The Wabash Lantern Grill did not provide health insurance. Very few diners in Logansport did. Cass made two dollars and one cent an hour plus tips, and on a good week the tips came to a hundred and forty dollars, and the rent over the Dutch Mill was a hundred and sixty a month, and she had been putting money into a coffee can in the back of her closet for three years now, and in the coffee can, as of that Thursday night, there was one thousand three hundred and twelve dollars.
She was nearly there for one ear. She had been nearly there for one ear for about a year, because things kept happening. The transmission on her Datsun. A tooth. Her sister in Peru, whose husband had been laid off from the Square D plant and who needed the gas bill paid in February or the kids would have been cold.
That was the first thing Cass Ruska was carrying. The coffee can. The masking tape. The way she had learned to stand on the right side of every table and every person, so that her good ear faced the world.
The second thing was the story line.
On Friday mornings before her shift, on her day off from the early breakfast, Cass took the bus to the Logansport-Cass County Public Library on Broadway, where the head of children's services, a tall, stooped, cheerful woman of about sixty named Mrs. Edith Sunderman, would be waiting for her in the little back room behind the picture books with a cassette recorder, a microphone wrapped in an old wool sock to cut down on the hiss, and a cup of tea.
The library had started the Story Line in 1979. You called a number, 753-READ, any hour of the day or night, and a recorded voice read you a story. It was meant for children. It ran about five minutes. It changed every week. When it was over, there was a beep, and you could leave a message for the Story Lady if you wanted to, and on Monday mornings Mrs. Sunderman would play back the tape and write down the messages and pin the best ones on the bulletin board by the water fountain.
Cass had been the Story Lady for two years.
It had started by accident. She had come into the library to look up a book about ears, and she had gotten to talking to Mrs. Sunderman at the desk, and Mrs. Sunderman had said, "You have a lovely voice, you know. Have you ever done any reading out loud?" and Cass had laughed and said, "Only menus," and Mrs. Sunderman had said, "Come back on Friday."
The truth was that Cass loved it more than anything she had ever done. She loved the little back room and the sock on the microphone and the tea. She loved choosing the stories, which she and Mrs. Sunderman did together, arguing pleasantly over Frog and Toad and Amelia Bedelia and the old folktales. She loved doing the voices. She did a good bear and a passable witch and a hen who was always worried, from a story called "The Little Red Hen Goes to Town," that had become, over the years, the most requested story on the line, so that they ran it again every few months by popular demand. At the end of that story the hen asks the fox a great many questions, and the fox says, "Questions are cheaper than the answers, madam," and Cass had always done the fox in a low, rueful, amused voice that curled up a little at the end.
And because she could not always hear the playback through the cassette recorder's tiny speaker, Mrs. Sunderman had bought, out of her own pocket, a pair of big padded headphones, and Cass would put them on and turn the volume all the way up and listen to the messages herself, every week, before she recorded the new story.
She knew the voices of her callers. Not their names, mostly. Their voices. The boy with the lisp who called every Tuesday and always said, "Thith wath a good one." The twins who fought over the receiver. The old man, not a child at all, who called once in a while at three in the morning and said only, "Thank you, ma'am. That was nice," and hung up.
And, since about the previous October, the girl who called herself R.
She called almost every night. She always left a message. She always started it the same way, "Hi, it's R again," very fast, as if she was afraid she would lose her nerve, and then she would say something about the story, and then, often, she would say something else.
Cass had them nearly memorized.