"Hey."
"You're not working."
"I'm not working," Cass said. "Not here. Not anymore. I start at the library on the first. I've got a rug, apparently. And twenty kids. And a little one in the back who cries."
"You'll hear her," Romy said.
"I'll hear her."
There was a pause. In the kitchen, Al Dorrance flicked up the red flag on its spring, for no reason, for nobody, out of habit, and the little plastic scorpion sat on the shelf above the grill and watched him do it.
Cass looked down at the booth, at the girl and the man and the napkin triangles and the open menu, and she thought about how long it had been since she had asked anybody for anything. She thought about the coffee can, which was empty now, and about the masking tape on her bedroom floor, which she had pulled up, all of it, every piece, on the night she got home from Lafayette. She thought about a cassette tape in a padded brown envelope. She thought about two strings fighting, wah, wah, wah, and somebody patient turning the pin, a little and a little, until they came to agree.
She did not know where this was going. She was not sure he did, either. There was a library and a house on Wheatland Avenue and a little girl who was not hers, and a woman in Tucson who was not a bad person, and a great many Thursdays still ahead, none of them promised. That was all right. She had spent four years being afraid of what she could not hear coming. She thought she might like, for a while, to find out.
"Can I join you?" Cass said.
Romy did not wait for her father. She slid over so fast that the napkin triangles went everywhere, scattering across the table and onto the floor like confetti, and she patted the red vinyl beside her with both hands.
Hobie Elkins looked at Cass for a long moment. Then he closed the menu, very carefully, and set it to one side.
"I was getting to the pies," he said.
"So get to them," said Cass, and sat down.
He opened it again. He found his place with his finger. And with both of them listening, the girl on one side and the woman on the other, slowly, carefully, word by word, he began to read.