Cass turned and looked down the counter at Mr. Fenstermaker, who was on his wobbly stool with his two eggs over easy and his coffee, reading the Pharos-Tribune with his glasses down at the end of his nose, the old tail gunner who had never in six years said one word about the war.
"He's a volunteer," Romy whispered. "For the Literacy. Daddy said I wasn't supposed to tell anybody. But you're not anybody."
When Hobie came back from the restroom, Cass looked at him for a long moment, and he looked back, and he knew. She could see that he knew. He went a little pink around the ears.
"She told you," he said.
"She told me."
"Well." He sat down. He picked up the menu, and then put it down again, as if it had gotten hot. "I figured if you could walk into a doctor's office in Lafayette, I could walk down a flight of stairs."
Cass did not say that she had walked into a doctor's office in Lafayette and then walked straight back out and not gone back for four years. She did not say anything about the State Office Building, or Mr. Fultz, or the three-page form. She reached across the table, instead, past the ketchup and the napkin triangles Romy had been folding, and put her hand over his on the menu, just for a second, just long enough to feel how warm it was.
Then she took it back, and picked up her fork, and said, "Mr. Fenstermaker, though. He never says a word to anybody."
"He says plenty," Hobie said. "He's just particular about who he says it to."
The bend came all the way around a week after that, at the end of June, and it did not come from either of them. It came from Tucson.
Raylene called on a Sunday, the way she always did, and asked for Romy for the summer. Six weeks, from the middle of July to the end of August, the way the lawyer in Kokomo had always said she could have if she wanted it. She had not asked last year. She had been getting settled, she said. But she had a two-bedroom now, with a pool in the complex, and her sister had a girl Romy's age, and she wanted her daughter. She was not asking to keep her. She just wanted her for the summer.
Hobie told Cass about it on the Thursday, in booth four, while Romy sat between them and stared at her grilled cheese and did not eat it.
"I don't want to go," Romy said.
"Sweetheart—"