"Or maybe," Cass said, "because I lied to you about swimmer's ear, and you knew it, and you figured you'd go first."
He looked up at her.
She had not planned to say it. She had not said it out loud to anyone in Logansport except Al Dorrance, and she had never actually said it to Al. She had just let him catch her by the walk-in. Her heart was going hard, the way it went when she stood on the newest piece of masking tape.
"It's not swimmer's ear," she said. "It's a thing called otosclerosis. My mother had it. A bone in your ear grows stiff and stops moving. The left one's about gone. The right one's going."
Hobie did not say he was sorry. He did not reach for her hand. He sat across from her in the booth and took that in the way he had taken in everything else, all of it at once, the whole shape, and after a moment he said, "That's why the tray."
"That's why the tray. Kenny said 'behind you.' He said it on the left."
"And that's why you sit on the right."
"That's why I do everything on the right."
"And you listen to her on the tape," he said slowly. "Romy. Every week. How?"
"Edith Sunderman bought me headphones. Big ones. Like a radio announcer." She tried to smile. "I turn them all the way up."
"And when they're all the way up, and that's not enough?"
Cass did not answer that. She looked at the clock over the register, the big round Coca-Cola one, and saw that her fifteen minutes had been twenty-five.
"I have to go back to work," she said.
"Cass."