"Then who does?"
He was silent so long she thought he wasn't going to answer. Then he reached into the breast pocket of the canvas coat, the place he had touched when he told her about the chip, and took out a square of paper folded very small, soft as cloth from being folded and unfolded, and laid it on the table and smoothed it with his crooked fingers. It was a page torn from a spiral notebook, and on it, in a careful round hand with circles over the i's, it said: Daddy, if you need me and I'm not home, call Marcelline. She'll know where I am. Any time day or night. I mean it. J. And a telephone number with a 702 in front of it.
"She give me that the first weekend," he said. "Marcelline's her sponsor. Woman about your age. Big laugh."
He heard what he had said a second after he said it. Coralee watched him hear it. Watched it go through him, slow, like cold water.
"Big laugh," he said again.
The pay phone at the Cattail was on the wall at the end of the counter, beside the register, a black Bell System box with a steel cord, and Benicio kept a coffee mug of dimes on top of it for anybody who needed to call a tow truck. Coralee took two dimes out of the mug and dropped them in and dialed the operator and asked for long distance, Reno, and read off the number on the notebook page,.
It rang once. It did not finish ringing twice.
"Hello." A woman's voice, low and smoky and completely awake. "Hello, this is Marcelline."
"My name is Coralee Dahlquist," Coralee said. "I work at the Cattail Cafe in Hawthorne. I've got a little girl here named Dovie and her grandfather. She's fine. She's asleep. She had some pie. I'm calling for her mother."
There was a sound on the line, not a word, something between a breath and a sob, and then a clatter, as if the receiver had been dropped or snatched, and another voice came on, younger and higher and cracked straight down the middle.