He thought about it, honestly, the way he thought about everything. "No," he said. "I'm sorry about a lot of things. Not that."
Cass recorded six stories that summer, the way she had promised. She recorded them in the back room on Fridays, with the big padded headphones on and the volume all the way up and Mrs. Sunderman sitting across the table from her, nodding along, holding up fingers to count down the seconds because Cass could not hear the little click when the tape started. She recorded "The Little Red Hen Goes to Town" again, by popular demand, and she did the fox in his low, rueful, amused voice, and at the end, instead of the usual sign-off, she said, "That's the story. That one goes out to everybody who's far from home this summer. Come back safe," and she did not say any names, because that was the rule, and she was keeping it.
On the fourteenth of August, Jeanette Ruska Pfeiffer drove her sister to St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Lafayette in a 1979 Pontiac LeMans with a cracked dashboard, and talked the entire sixty miles about her children, her husband, her husband's mother, the foreman on the Square D line, and the price of hamburger, and Cass, sitting on the passenger side with Jeanette on her bad ear, heard almost none of it and was more grateful for every word than she could have said.
The surgery took an hour and twenty minutes. Dr. Hazlett did it with Cass awake, under a local, with a sheet tented over her face, and she lay there on the table staring at the white cloth and feeling a strange, distant pressure deep in her head, a tapping, a tugging, like somebody rearranging furniture in a house down the street. At one point he said something to the nurse that she did not catch. And at another point, toward the end, there was a moment, very brief, a second, maybe less, when the whole world jumped up loud: the hiss of the oxygen, the clink of a steel instrument on a tray, somebody's shoes squeaking on the tile, Dr. Hazlett's own breath. It was like a door flung open on a party. And then they packed the ear, and it all went muffled again, and she lay there on the table under the sheet with tears running sideways into her hair.
"You heard it," Dr. Hazlett said, leaning over her. She read it off his lips. "Didn't you. For a second. They always do."
She nodded. She could not have spoken.
Afterward, she was dizzy for three days, so dizzy she could not stand up without holding the wall, and Jeanette stayed with her over the Dutch Mill and made her soup and slept on the couch and complained about the fern, which was, Jeanette said, the most pathetic plant she had ever seen in her life and someone ought to put it out of its misery. On the second day, the telephone rang, and Jeanette answered it, and listened, and then came and held the receiver up to Cass's right ear.
"Hey," said Hobie Elkins. "It's me. How's the ear?"
"Full of cotton."
"How's the rest of you?"
"Upside down." She closed her eyes. "Jeanette says the fern's a disgrace."
"I fed it. I swear I fed it. I went over Tuesday with a watering can and I talked to it for a while. I told it about the high school piano. I don't think it helped."
She laughed, and the laugh made her dizzy, and she held on to the arm of the couch until the room stopped turning.
"Cass," he said. "I sent you something. It should be there tomorrow. You don't have to listen to it till you feel up to it."