"Like grown-up people. You and me. And Romy, too, but she doesn't get to run it."
"Can I say something?" said Romy, from the car.
"No," said both of them at once, and Romy flopped back against the seat in an ecstasy of injury, and Cass saw Hobie bite the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing, and felt the corner of her own mouth go.
So that was how it went. Thursdays at six-fifteen. Booth four, with the electrical tape on the vinyl. Cass on the inside, Romy on her right, Hobie across. The jukebox playing Tears for Fears, or Madonna, or once, for reasons nobody could explain, Patsy Cline three times in a row. They talked like people. Hobie told her about pianos and she told him about the customers: about Mr. Fenstermaker on his wobbly stool, who had been a tail gunner over Germany and who ordered the same two eggs over easy every morning and had never once, in six years, said a single word about the war; about the women from the courthouse who split one slice of pie four ways and fought over the check like it was a championship bout; about the Burkhalter boys and their eternal quarters. Romy listened with her chin on her fists and asked questions, a great many questions, which Cass pointed out were cheaper than the answers, until it became a thing between them, a phrase, so that Romy would say "Cheaper!" and Cass would say "Than the answers!" and Hobie would roll his eyes up at the pressed-tin ceiling like a long-suffering saint.
And slowly, almost without either of them noticing, the rules began to bend.
It was a small bend at first. The second Thursday in May, Hobie brought a manila envelope and slid it across the table to her, very fast, the way you slide something you are ashamed of.
"What's this?"
"Romy's school sent it home. It's for summer reading. There's a form." He did not look at her. "I can't make out the part on the back. I usually take them to the lady at the bank. But the bank's closed till Monday and it has to go in Friday."
Cass read it to him. It took two minutes. It was a list of books and a place for a parent's signature and a line about a pizza party at the end of the summer for anyone who read ten. She read it quietly, on her side of the table, and then she turned it around and put her finger on the line where he had to sign, and he signed it, a slow, careful, slightly crooked signature, and put it back in the envelope, and neither of them said a word about it.
That was the first bend.
The second came a week later, and it was hers.
Hobie had a job tuning the piano at the First Presbyterian on North Street, the big Mason and Hamlin in the fellowship hall that they used for weddings and for the Thursday night choir, and he asked her if she wanted to come and see how it was done. It was a Tuesday, her afternoon off. Romy was at school. Cass said yes before she could think of a reason to say no, and then spent the whole bus ride thinking of reasons, and arrived at the church with eleven of them ready, and forgot every one of them the minute she walked into the fellowship hall and saw him.
He had the front of the piano off. She had never seen the inside of a piano before, not really, not like this, with the whole harp of it exposed, the long gold-colored frame and the hundreds of strings stretched across it in their silver ranks, and the dampers lifted, and the little felt hammers waiting. It looked like the inside of a clock. It looked like the inside of a cathedral. Hobie was bent over it with a tuning lever in his hand, a long-handled thing like a T-shaped wrench, and he had a strip of red felt woven through the strings to mute some of them, and he was striking one key, over and over, very softly, with his head cocked and his eyes closed.
He did not hear her come in. She stood in the doorway and watched him for five minutes before he opened his eyes.