"I'm Cass."
"I know," Hobie said. "It's on your tag."
He got into the car. Through the window she could see Romy twisting around in her seat to watch her, the yellow raincoat bright as a dandelion in the gray interior, and Romy's mouth moving, saying something to her father that Cass could not hear.
She would not have heard it even if she had been standing at the open window. Cass Ruska was thirty-one years old, and she had been losing her hearing for four years, and in the left ear it was very nearly gone.
She folded the ten into her apron and went back inside to help Kenny with the mop.
That night, at home in her apartment over the Dutch Mill Bakery on Broadway, Cass did what she did every Thursday night. She took the bus card out of the drawer by the telephone and checked the date on it, and then she set her alarm clock for six, and then she took a hot bath, and then she sat on the edge of the bed in her robe and did her exercises.
Nobody had prescribed the exercises. She had invented them. She would turn on the clock radio on the nightstand to WSAL, low, and then she would walk backward away from it, one step at a time, until she could not make out the words anymore. Then she would mark that spot on the floor with a piece of masking tape. There were a lot of pieces of masking tape on the floor of Cass Ruska's bedroom. They started near the closet door and they came, month by month, closer and closer to the bed.
The newest piece was about four feet from the radio.
She stood on it for a while, listening to a man talk about soybean futures, catching about one word in three, and then she went and sat back down on the bed and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes.
Her mother had gone deaf at forty. Cass remembered it, though she had been small. It had not happened all at once. It had happened the way a tide goes out, so slowly you think it is standing still, and then you look up and the boats are sitting on mud. Her mother had worked at the Greyhound depot in Peru and then she had worked at the Greyhound depot in Peru a little less, because she could not hear the departures, and then she had worked in the back sorting freight, and then she had not worked at all. She had sat in the kitchen in Peru and watched people's mouths. She had become, over the years, very good at watching people's mouths, and very quiet, and very sad, and she had died at fifty-eight still very good and very quiet and very sad.
There was a word for what her mother had. Cass had learned it from a library book at nineteen, and then she had learned it again at twenty-seven, from a doctor named Hazlett in Lafayette who had looked into her ears with a light and then sat back on his stool and said it to her in a gentle voice. Otosclerosis. A bone in the middle ear, the smallest bone in the body, the size of a grain of rice, shaped like a stirrup. It was supposed to move. It vibrated, and the vibration was sound. In her mother, and now in Cass, the bone had begun to grow into place, a little spongy crust of extra bone, cementing it, until it could not move at all.
"The good news," Dr. Hazlett had said, "is that this is a mechanical problem. It's not the nerve. The nerve's fine. It's like a door that's rusted shut. We can't oil it, but we can replace it."
He had explained the surgery. A stapedectomy. They went in through the ear canal, they took out the frozen bone, and they put in a tiny piston of wire and plastic in its place. It worked, he said, in nine cases out of ten. People heard birds they had forgotten about. People cried on the table.
It cost, at St. Elizabeth's in Lafayette, in 1985, with the surgeon and the hospital and the anesthetist and the follow-up, about two thousand one hundred dollars per ear.