"She knows. She said so. She said you were just mad."
"I was mad," he said, "because I can't read it."
Cass waited.
"I can't read," he said. "Not really. I mean I can. I can read a work order. I can read a road sign if I've got a second. I can read 'Steinway' and 'Baldwin' and 'Kimball' because I've seen them ten thousand times. But you give me a page of a book and tell me to read it out loud, and the letters get up and walk around. They swap places. They won't hold still. It's like—" He laughed, without any pleasure in it. "It's like a piano where all the strings are fighting. Wah, wah, wah. And they never agree."
"Hobie."
"I was the dumb kid. That's what they called me, in Delphi. That was the whole thing. Teachers used to make me stand up and read in front of the class, so I'd learn, and I'd stand up there and sweat through my shirt and every kid in the room would be laughing, and one of them, Lester Fultz, he used to wait for me after school and—" He touched the scar on his left knuckles, briefly, without seeming to know he was doing it. "Well. Anyway. I quit school at sixteen and went to Fort Wayne and swept Mr. Ullrich's shop, and he found out I could hear a string a quarter-cent flat from across the room, and that was that. Nobody ever needed me to read again. I got married, and Raylene did all the reading. The bills, the lease, the forms from the school. Bedtime. She read Romy a story every single night from the day she was born."
"And then she went to Tucson."
"Eighteen months ago in March." He said it flatly, a date he had had to say many times. "Her sister had a job for her down there. Real estate office. She said Logansport was a coffin and she was going to suffocate in it. She wasn't wrong, maybe. Not for her. We weren't any good by then, either of us. It was nobody's fault, or it was both of ours. She wanted to take Romy and I said no and we went to the lawyer in Kokomo, and in the end she didn't fight it. She said Romy should finish school where her friends were. She calls on Sundays. She sends birthday cards with twenty-dollar bills in them. She's not a bad person. She just didn't want to live here and I didn't know how to live anywhere else."
"And the stories stopped."
"The stories stopped." He looked down at his hands. "I tried. I bought a book of fairy tales at the Ben Franklin and I'd read them ahead of time, at night, after she was asleep, over and over, so I'd have them memorized. That worked for about a month. Then she wanted new ones. She wanted the hen one. She'd heard it on the phone, I guess, and she brought it home from the school library and asked me to read it, and I got about three lines in and I couldn't. I just couldn't. And she was looking at me with that face, and I could feel my shirt getting wet like I was back in the fourth grade with Lester Fultz laughing, and I shut the book and I said, 'Daddy's tired, call the Story Lady,' and I went out on the porch and I stood there in the dark like a—" He stopped. "So that's why she calls. I told her to. I gave her the number."
They sat for a while. In the kitchen, Romy was saying something, and Al Dorrance was answering, and Cass could not make out the words, only the rhythm, the high voice and the low one trading back and forth.
"I'm not telling you any of this for a reason," Hobie said. "I don't know why I'm telling you."
"Because I told you about the messages."
"Maybe."