"I have to go back to work, Hobie. Tell Romy—" And there she stopped, because she had no idea what she wanted him to tell Romy.
But Romy was already coming out of the kitchen, carrying, with enormous care, a single paper cup of chocolate milk that Al had evidently given her as a reward for helping. She walked down the aisle between the booths with her eyes fixed on the cup and her tongue between her teeth, the way she had folded napkins on Thursday, and she did not spill a drop, and when she got to booth four she set it down in front of her father with the air of someone delivering a medal.
"He let me flick the flag," she said. "The red flag. For when the food is ready. He said it's because the bell gives him a headache, but I don't think that's true, I think it's for her." She turned to Cass. "Is it for you?"
Cass looked through the window in the swinging door at Al Dorrance's broad back, bent over the grill.
"Yes," she said. "I guess it is."
"That's nice of him," Romy said, and climbed back into the booth, and finally, all at once, with tremendous appetite, ate her coconut cream pie.
What grew up between them over the next two months did not have a name, and Cass was careful not to give it one.
It had rules, at first. She made the rules on the bus home that Saturday night, sitting by the window with her forehead against the cool glass, watching the lights of the Eel River bridge go by, and she laid them out for Hobie the following Thursday in the parking lot behind the Lantern, standing by the Citation with her arms folded, while Romy sat in the passenger seat with the window rolled down, pretending very hard not to listen.
The first rule was that the Story Line was not hers. It belonged to every kid in Cass County who picked up a phone at night, and Cass was not going to start reading to Romy specially, or sneaking her name into the stories, or doing anything on the tape that the boy with the lisp or the fighting twins would not get too.
"That's fair," Hobie said.
The second rule was that she was not anybody's mother. She was not going to come over and do bedtime. She was not going to fill in the shape that Raylene had left in that house, because she had seen what happened to a shape like that when you filled it with the wrong thing, and it was not good for anyone, least of all the child.
"That's fair too," Hobie said, more slowly.
The third rule was that on Thursdays, when they came in for supper, she would take her break at six-fifteen and she would sit with them in booth four for fifteen minutes. Twenty if it was slow. She would eat whatever Al gave her. And they would talk like people.
"Like people," Hobie repeated.