She heard it loud and clear, a pure, high, humming note, right inside her own head, as if somebody had lit a candle in a dark room. She heard it in the ear that had not heard anything clearly in two years. She gasped. She actually gasped, out loud, in the fellowship hall of the First Presbyterian, and put her hand up and caught his wrist.
"There," Hobie said softly. "That's what he told me. If you can't hear it in the air but you can hear it through the bone, then the nerve's still good. It's just the door that's stuck."
"I know," Cass said. Her voice came out strange. "I know that. A doctor told me that. In Lafayette. Four years ago."
"Then why—"
"Because I didn't hear it," she said. "He told me. I didn't hear it."
She let go of his wrist. She walked away from the piano, across the fellowship hall, past the folding tables and the coffee urn and the bulletin board with the potluck sign-up sheet on it, and she stood at the window with her back to him and looked out at North Street, and she did not cry, because she had decided a long time ago, standing in her mother's kitchen in Peru, that she would not cry about it. She stood there not crying for a long time.
He did not come after her. She was grateful for that. Behind her, after a while, she heard him start working again, faintly, one note, then another, then the first one again, patient, patient.
When she came back, he did not look up. He said, to the piano, "How much is it? The operation?"
"Hobie."
"I'm just asking. You can tell me to go to hell."
"Twenty-one hundred. For one ear."
"How much have you got?"
"That really is none of your business."
"I know." He set down the lever. "I've got some put by. Not a lot. But Mr. Ullrich left me a little when he died, and I've never touched it, it's just been sitting there at Farmers and Merchants doing nothing, and I was going to put it toward Romy's college, but she's seven, there's time, there's eleven years, and—"