"Take three," he said. "You look like you could use one."
Hobie Elkins was wearing the same corduroy jacket. He had shaved, though, and his hair had been combed with water, and he had the look of a man who had been argued into something in the car and lost.
"She wouldn't let it go," he said, by way of hello. "I want you to know I tried. I told her you were just being nice. She said you promised."
"I did promise."
"She said that too."
Cass set down three plates of coconut cream pie. They were very tall pieces. Al had cut them himself and he cut pie the way some men pour whiskey.
"I've got fifteen minutes," she said, and she slid into the booth beside Romy, on Romy's left, so that the girl was on her right side and Hobie was across from her, both of them where she could hear them. She did it without thinking. She had been doing it without thinking for years.
Hobie watched her do it.
Romy did not touch her pie. She sat with both hands under her thighs and looked at Cass sideways, as if Cass were a deer that had walked into the yard and might bolt if anybody moved.
"Go on," Hobie said. "You wanted to talk to her. Here she is."
"I know," Romy said. "I'm just looking."
So they ate pie, and Romy looked, and Hobie talked, because somebody had to. He talked about pianos. He had a gift for it that Cass would not have guessed from the man kneeling in gravy. He told her that he had learned tuning from an old German in Fort Wayne named Mr. Ullrich, who had apprenticed in Hamburg before the war and who believed that every piano had a personality and most of them were sulking. He told her that the piano in the Logansport High School auditorium was the worst piano in Indiana and that he had tuned it eleven times and it had gone out of tune again before the choir finished the national anthem. He told her about a widow in Galveston, not the Texas one, the little town fifteen miles south, who kept her late husband's ashes inside her grand piano, under the lid, in a coffee can.
"A coffee can," Cass said.
"Maxwell House."