Afterward, in the parking lot, with Romy asleep in the passenger seat from the exhaustion of weeping, Hobie stood by the Citation with his hands in his pockets and did not look at her.
"Thank you," he said. "I couldn't have done that."
"Sure you could."
"No. She'd have hated me. She'd have thought I was sending her away." He was quiet for a while. "I'm going to miss her like crazy, Cass. I don't know what I'm going to do in that house."
"You're going to go to the basement with the fish tank on Tuesdays and Saturdays," Cass said, "and you're going to read with Mr. Fenstermaker. And you're going to tune the worst piano in Indiana. And you're going to be fine."
"And on Thursdays?"
She hesitated.
There were things she could say. There were things she wanted to say, standing there in the warm June dark behind the Wabash Lantern with the lantern humming over the door and the river smell coming up from the south. But there was something else, too, that she had not told him, and it was coming, now, in the second week of August, on a date written on a card stuck to her refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a strawberry, and she did not know yet how it would go.
"On Thursdays," she said at last, "I might be in Lafayette."
She told him the rest of it the following Thursday, after Romy had gone to the restroom to wash the ketchup off her elbows.
The State of Indiana had looked at her three-page form and at a letter from Dr. Hazlett and at another letter, two paragraphs long, typed on library stationery and signed by Edith Sunderman, which said that the Logansport-Cass County Public Library would be pleased to offer Miss Cass Ruska the position of Children's Services Assistant beginning the first of October, contingent on her ability to safely supervise groups of young children, and which Mrs. Sunderman had read aloud to Cass in the back room with the sock-wrapped microphone in a tone of voice that suggested she would like to see anybody try to argue with it. And the State of Indiana had agreed to pay for the surgery on her left ear. Not all of it. Fifteen hundred dollars. The rest, six hundred dollars and some change, Cass would pay herself, out of a coffee can at the back of her closet.
"So you did it," Hobie said.
"I did it."
"By yourself."