"Mostly by myself. Edith wrote a letter. Mr. Fultz did the paperwork. Dr. Hazlett called the hospital twice." She turned her coffee cup around on its saucer. "And a piano tuner hit me in the head with a fork."
"Behind the ear," Hobie said. "Very gently."
"Very gently," she agreed.
"When is it?"
"The fourteenth. A Wednesday. My sister Jeanette's driving me down from Peru. She's taking two days off the Square D line, now that they've called her husband back, and she says she owes me for the gas bill and she's not going to hear another word about it." Cass smiled. "We're Ruskas. We're very bad at being owed."
"I noticed that." He was quiet for a moment. "Can I do anything?"
She almost said no. She had the word in her mouth. Then she thought about him standing at the top of a flight of stairs at the public library, looking down at the basement with the fish tank, and walking down anyway.
"You could feed my plant," she said. "There's a fern. Over the bakery. It's a terrible fern, it's been dying since 1982. I'll give you the key."
"I'll feed your fern."
"And you can call me. After. The doctor says I won't hear much for a couple of weeks, there's packing in the ear and it has to heal, so it's no good calling on the bad side. But Jeanette will hold the phone up to the right one."
"I'll call," Hobie said.
Romy left for Tucson on the twentieth of July. Hobie drove her to the airport in Indianapolis, and Raylene flew up to meet her and take her back on the plane, and Hobie told Cass later that it had been all right. Better than all right. Raylene had cried when she saw Romy, and she had hugged Hobie in the middle of the concourse, briefly and hard, and said, "You've done a good job with her, Hob, she looks good," and he had not known what to do with that, and still did not.
"She looked happy," he said. "Raylene. She looked like somebody who'd gotten out of a coffin."
"Are you sorry?"