He did not do the voices. He did not do the hen or the pig or the worried goose. He just read, in his own patient, plain voice, all the way through, and it was the worst reading of "The Little Red Hen Goes to Town" that Cass had ever heard, and she sat on her couch over the Dutch Mill Bakery in Logansport, Indiana, with the headphones turned all the way up and her left ear packed with cotton and her head spinning, and listened to every word of it, and cried as she had not cried since her mother's kitchen in Peru.
And at the end, when the hen had asked the fox all her questions, Hobie did do one voice. Just one. He did it badly, low and rueful, curling up a little at the end, an imitation of an imitation.
"'Questions,'" he read, "'are cheaper than the answers, madam.'"
There was a long pause. The pages closed. She heard him breathe out.
"That's the story," Hobie said. "I practiced it for three weeks. Romy doesn't know. I'm going to read it to her when she gets back, but I wanted you to hear it first, because—" He stopped. In the background, Mr. Fenstermaker said something she could not make out, and then there was the sound of a chair scraping and footsteps going away, slow ones, and a door closing.
"He left," Hobie said. "He's a gentleman. Okay. Because—because you're the one who said it. In the booth. That I'd go first. I don't know if that's true. I think you went first, actually. I think you went first a long time ago and you just didn't tell anybody. But anyway. I wanted you to have it. I wanted you to have a story somebody read just for you, for once, instead of the other way around. That's all. Get better. Feed your fern. I'll see you on a Thursday."
Click.
The packing came out twelve days later, in Dr. Hazlett's office in Lafayette, and Cass sat in the chair with her hands gripping the armrests while he drew it out with a pair of long, thin tweezers, and then he sat back on his stool and said, in a perfectly ordinary voice, without turning his head toward her good side, "Well, Miss Ruska. How's that?"
And she heard him.
On her left side. Clearly. Every word.
She heard, then, all at once, the way you hear the first rain on a roof: the air conditioner in the window. A typewriter in the next room. Somebody's radio playing Hall and Oates, very faintly, through the wall. The paper sheet on the exam chair crinkling under her as she shifted. Her own breath, which she had not heard on that side in two years, going in and out of her like the sea. And outside, beyond the window, in the parking lot of the medical building, a single bird, some ordinary sparrow, singing its heart out on a light pole as if no one had ever listened to it before.
"Oh," Cass said. "Oh, well."
Romy came home on the last day of August, brown as a walnut, two inches taller, with a new haircut that a real person had done in a real salon in Tucson, and a souvenir scorpion trapped forever in a block of plastic that she presented to Al Dorrance with great ceremony and that Al set on the shelf above the grill, next to the red flag, where it remained for the next eleven years. She listened to all six tapes on the Story Line in a row, on the first night back, sitting on the kitchen floor of the house on Wheatland Avenue with the receiver pressed to her ear, and then she left a message that was so long it ran out the end of the tape, and Mrs. Sunderman had to save it in a separate box.
And on the second Thursday in September, Cass Ruska worked her last shift at the Wabash Lantern Grill.