"No," Cass said.
"Just listen—"
"No. Hobie, no. Absolutely not." She was surprised at how angry she was. It came up out of her like steam from a pot. "You don't get to do that. You don't get to buy me a new ear because you feel sorry for me. That's not what this is. I've been doing this by myself for four years and I am going to finish doing it by myself, and if you ever offer me money again I am going to walk out of whatever room you're in and not come back. Do you understand me?"
He looked at her. His face was very still.
"I understand you," he said.
"Good."
"I don't think I'd be doing it because I feel sorry for you, though."
"I don't care why you'd be doing it."
"All right." He picked the lever back up. "All right, Cass."
She left soon after. She was ashamed of herself on the bus home, and angry at herself for being ashamed, and angry at him for making her feel either thing. That night she stood on the newest piece of masking tape for a long time, and then she went to the coffee can at the back of the closet and counted it again, and it was still one thousand three hundred and forty dollars, and she sat on the floor of the closet with the can in her lap and thought about the sound of the tuning fork through the bone, that pure clear note, like a candle in a dark room.
It's just the door that's stuck.
The next morning, before her shift, she did something she had been not doing for four years. She took the bus to the State Office Building on Fourth Street and went up to the second floor, to a door with frosted glass that said INDIANA DIVISION OF VOCATIONAL REHABILITATION, and she went in.
She had known about it, in a vague way, for a long time. Dr. Hazlett had mentioned it in Lafayette and given her a pamphlet, and she had kept the pamphlet in her kitchen drawer with the bus cards and the takeout menus and never called the number on it, because the pamphlet talked about disabilities and Cass Ruska did not have a disability, she had a bad ear from swimming as a kid. That was the story. That was the story she had told everyone in Logansport, and somewhere along the way she had started to tell it to herself.
The counselor was a soft-voiced man of about fifty named Mr. Fultz, with a cardigan and a wall of framed photographs of what seemed to be the same golden retriever at different ages, and he listened to her with his hands folded on his blotter and his head tilted, and when she had finished he nodded slowly.