"Go ask him anyway, sweetheart. Please."
Romy looked at Cass. Cass nodded. The girl slid out of the booth and walked to the swinging door, looking back twice, and pushed through, and they could hear her small voice in the kitchen saying "My dad says do you need help," and Al Dorrance's deep, surprised rumble, and then the sound, astonishing to Cass, of Al laughing.
Hobie put his hands flat on the table. They were the hands she had noticed on the floor, the scar across the knuckles, the graphite under the nails. They were not quite still.
"What does she say," he said. "In the messages."
"I don't know if I should tell you that."
"Please."
So she told him. Not all of it. Not word for word. But she told him about the bear and about Tucson, and about the night he had tried to read her the hen story and gotten mad and put the book down. And then, because she had decided on the walk from the pie case that she would not pretend the girl wasn't real, she told him about Monday.
"She said you eat supper with just her," Cass said. "She said you don't have anybody to eat with. And she said she wished I could come eat with you, so you'd have a grown-up to talk to."
Hobie Elkins sat in booth number four of the Wabash Lantern Grill and looked out the window at Market Street for a very long time.
"She's seven," he said finally. "She's seven years old, and she's worried about me."
"Yes."
"That's not right. That's backwards. That's not how it's supposed to go."
"No," Cass said. "But it's how it goes sometimes."
He rubbed his face with both hands. "I didn't put the book down because I was mad at her. I want you to know that. I wasn't mad at her."