June gave Ada the cassette. She explained about the lady with the pencil and the fact that the tape was getting old and might be better copied before they tried to play it again. Ada wanted to know if a real person would have to listen to the whole thing to copy it. “I think mostly the machine can do it by itself.”
“I wouldn't mind if a real person listened,” Ada said. “They sound nice.”
“Even with the wrong words?”
“That's how I know it's them.”
Much later, in the small blue room Tess kept for visitors, June took out the paper bag to put it somewhere flatter than a sweatshirt pocket. Her phone lit up. It was a new message from Daniel. The pictures from the kitchen manager had come through. He had permission to show them to someone outside the company. He had something else too. Someone at the conference had quietly sent him an older version of the training handbook. He attached a picture of a yellowed page. Fewer than thirty words had been underlined, and the signature of the employee who had requested that the instruction be changed was still legible at the bottom.
June sat on the bed and enlarged it until she could see the name.
It wasn't Daniel's mother. She had expected that much. But she had supposed, quite naturally, that a person who put in writing a deliberate omission of service would be a person with a great deal to answer for.
The person who had objected to the change, seven long years before she wrote LET HER ASK FOR IT on a card and put it under a plate, was Meredith.
Chapter 4- The Second Line 8999
Tess woke her early by dropping a clean towel across her feet. “You're coming to the pool. I signed us up for the nine o'clock. They'll let you in in a T-shirt and shorts.”
“Is this part of the Oregon adoption requirements?”
“Almost everything is. Actually it's the only place you're pretty safe leaving your phone alone for an hour.”
“I could accidentally drop it off a bridge.”
“You could. But first answer your daughter. She's got my number now and she knows how to use it.”
June reached under the pillow. Libby had sent a picture of a notice taped to the window of the coffee shop across from the East Borough depot. WE ARE FRESH OUT OF FIRST CLASS CHICKEN. BUS DRIVERS STILL EAT FREE. The manager had put a black line through the S in DRIVERS and written JUNE above it. Then somebody had crossed out the correction and written ALL OF THEM. Marsha had managed to start a pay dispute at a coffee shop purely on the strength of a joke.
Her daughter had also sent an email address for an editor who wanted the real story. Unlike the people from Cabin Justice, this editor put her name on what she published. She'd written about a wheelchair lift manufacturer two years before and had once spent an entire winter following a woman who delivered hot lunches to old people along the county line. She said she was interested in stories that would still be stories without a recording of them. Libby liked that sentence. She thought her mother might like it too.
June wrote, Tell her I am considering my options and will call her if I decide to. Now tell me the important thing. How did your big blue pot come out of the kiln?
There was no answer for half a minute, then a photograph of a round pot with three small feet, one of which appeared to have traveled a short distance farther than the other two. It leaned noticeably to the left. The glaze was exquisite; greenish in the light and blue at the edges, with a thin line of bare red clay just under the rim.
It has a limp, Libby wrote.
Your grandma had one of those. It never got in the way of her holding soup.
Yeah, but I made five others with the same bad foot. Nobody wants six wobbly pots.
Somebody wants a little practice fixing a foot. I love you. Go eat.
At the pool Ada demonstrated a dive called the Stapler, in which she hung folded over the edge and then simply dropped into the water. They got a lot of splashing for very little effort that way. Tess swam lengths. Noreen, who could build a dining table out of discarded floorboards but couldn't swim a stroke, sat on a bench with Judge Cabbage and gave scores. At some point June found herself alone with Tess in the shallow end, holding the wall while the splashing went on behind them.
“You can stop trying quite so hard,” Tess said.
“I wasn't aware I was trying.”
“You've been making jokes since you got off the airplane. You do that when something hurts.”
“Maybe I'm just amusing, Tess.”
“Then we'd better get the doctor to take another look at it.”
They were both silent. The water went in and out of the grated gutters with a homely washing-up sound. A boy in red trunks walked very carefully past a sign that said WALK, saw a sign permitting him to jump, and threw himself off the side with a scream of relief.
“I wanted to be there,” June said.
“You were there. Ada asked you for the song. You sang it. I didn't arrange any of that.”
“I know.”
“You sound like you still think it ought to have been different.”
“It should have been. A kid waiting for her aunt shouldn't have to be happy with singing on a telephone.”