“Hi. How’s everybody?” he asked.
“Oh God, what a week it’s going to be,” Paula said.
Her flustery tone depressed him right away. So much cooler than Alice, even when Alice was at her stiffest. “Can I speak to the girls?”
“Sure. Sure, hold on.”
Elissa. “Hi, Daddy.”
“How you doing, cookie?” Sweetness, home, he thought.
“Daddy, you know my friend Holly?”
“Yes?”
“She’s very vain.”
“Really?” He’d never heard her use this word. It was an adult word, complex and layered, and it sounded both funny and frightening in her voice.
“Today while we were playing? She wouldn’t take off her sweater, even though she was getting really hot.”
“I see. Was it windy where you were? It was a terrible afternoon, wasn’t it?”
“Uh-huh. You want to talk to Jane now?” Clearly, for Elissa, Holly had been the day’s major business. There was nothing left to discuss.
Hugh wished the college ran half as efficiently as this.
“Daddy!” Jane said.
“How are you, pumpkin?”
“I bumped my arm on the door. I’m much more better now.”
“Good.”
“But I cried a little this morning.”
“I’m so sorry. Have you been practicing your play?”
“Sort of Some of the girls won’t learn their lines.”
“Hm. Can you be the director, then, and tell them how important it is to be prepared?”
“I guess.”
“You’d be really good at it.”
“Okay!”
“Okay, then. Sleep well tonight, honey. I love you. Kiss your sister for me.”
“Ewww!”
Dizzy with hunger now, he found a corner booth, ordered a chicken-fried steak and sweetened iced tea. Truckers sat at a counter slurping coffee. “Don’t know what it’s like, west of N’awlins,” one said. “I heard around midafternoon they had gale-force winds, some debris on the highway. Maybe they’ve cleared it by now.”
“Just have to head that way, I s’pose, take my chances.”
Hugh thought of calling Paula back, warning her to shut her windows tight. But he’d just piss her off. There was only so much he could do for his girls from a distance.
When his steak arrived, it was drowned in steaming white gravy. Comfort food.
His daughters’ voices had anchored him back in his world. He missed his bed. He missed Alice.
He must have dozed. Next thing he knew, his plate was gone, the ice had melted in his glass, and the check lay in a dribble of water on the table. The waitress, pale, with a scribbled nametag, “Sally,” grinned at him. “Didn’t know whether to shake you, partner, or let you be. Finally figured you needed your beauty rest.”
“Yes.” He rubbed his face. His skin was flaky and dry. “I guess I did.”
“Get you anything else tonight?”
“That’ll do it.” He handed her a ten.
He stood for a while in the parking lot, letting the air wake him up. The sky couldn’t make up its mind. The wind had calmed some, but still tossed twigs across the road: a sound like aspirin spilling from a bottle. In his car, Hugh tried the radio. Slushy static. Silence, an absence that made him realize he probably wouldn’t see much of Spider any more, now that Spider was tired of white folks “slummin.” Well. He’d helped the man recover his music. That was something, at least.
Hugh switched on his lights, caught a glimpse of an owl just to the left of the road. Yawning, blinking, unsettled, he wound on back to Mama Houston. If he didn’t make it home too late tonight—he rolled down his window to smell the “goddam sky”—he could guide the old woman to Carlos’s shed behind the restaurant.
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It Takes a Worried Man Page 22
