"It's not a sure thing," he said. "I want to be honest with you. The program exists to help people get and keep employment. If you were losing your job because of your hearing, or couldn't do it safely, that's what we look at. Waitressing—well. You've done it for six years with one ear."
"I dropped a tray on Thursday," Cass said. "In the middle of supper. A busboy came up on my bad side."
Mr. Fultz wrote that down.
"And there's something else," she said, and her heart was going hard again, the masking-tape feeling. "There's a job. Or there's going to be. At the public library, in children's services. The lady who runs it, Mrs. Sunderman, she's retiring in two years, and the girl who's next in line is moving to Indianapolis this fall. Mrs. Sunderman asked me if I'd apply for the assistant job. It's thirty hours a week to start and it pays four-fifteen an hour and there's insurance through the county, and she said she'd help me get my associate's at Ivy Tech at night so I could move up. I said no. I said no because I can't hear the children. Story hour, the circle time. You've got twenty kids on a rug and they're all talking at once and you have to hear the little one in the back who's crying. I can't do that. Not like this."
She stopped. Mr. Fultz had stopped writing and was looking at her over his glasses.
"But you'd like to," he said.
"I'd like to," Cass said, "more than I have ever wanted anything in my whole life."
It was the first time she had said it out loud. It sounded, in that small office with the golden retrievers, like somebody else's voice.
Mr. Fultz was quiet for a moment. Then he unfolded his hands and pulled a form out of his desk drawer, a long one, three pages, and turned it around and slid it across the blotter to her, and handed her a pen.
"Well," he said. "Then let's write that down."
She did not tell Hobie about Mr. Fultz. Not that Thursday, and not the one after. She told herself it was because nothing was certain yet and she did not want to get anybody's hopes up, but the truth, she knew, was simpler and less flattering than that: she wanted it to be hers. Whatever happened, she wanted to be able to look back and say she had done it herself.
But she noticed that something was different about him on the Thursdays, too. He was tired. He came in with dark circles under his eyes, and twice she caught him with his lips moving silently while he looked at the menu, which he had never bothered to look at before, since he ordered the meatloaf every week. And one Thursday in early June, Romy leaned over while he was in the restroom and whispered, with the tremendous pride of someone revealing a state secret, "Daddy goes to school now."
"He does?"
"At the library. On Tuesdays and Saturdays. In the room in the basement with the fish tank. There's a man who helps him." Romy's eyes went very round. "It's the man from here. The man with the eggs."