Ralph smiled. It felt large and dopey and disconnected on his face-almost a drunken smile. “Yes, ma’am.”
When the waitress came over and slid their check facedown in front of him, Ralph noticed that the button reading LIFE IS NOT A CHOICE was no longer pinned to the frill of her apron, “Listen,” she said with an earnestness Ralph found almost painfully touching, “I’m sorry if I offended you folks. You came in for breakfast, not a lecture.”
“You didn’t offend us,” Ralph said. He glanced across the table at Lois, who nodded agreement.
The waitress smiled briefly. “Thanks for saying so, but I still kinda zoomed on you. Any other day I wouldn’ta, but we’re having OLir own rally this afternoon at four, and I’m introducing Mr. Dalton.
They told me I could have three minutes, and I guess that’s about what I gave you.”
“That’s all right,” Lois said, and patted her hand. “Really.”
The waitress’s smile was warmer and more genuine this time, but as she started to turn away, Ralph saw Lois’s pleasant expression falter.
She was looking at the yellow-black blob floating just above the waitress’s right hip.
Ralph pulled out the pen he kept clipped to his breast pocket, turned over his paper placemat, and printed quickly on the back.
When he was done, he took out his wallet and placed a five-dollar bill carefully below what he had written. When the waitress reached for the tip, she would hardly be able to avoid seeing the message.
He picked up the check and flapped it at Lois. “Our first real date and I guess it’ll have to be dutch,” he said. “I’m three bucks short if I leave her the five. Please tell me you’re not broke.”
“Who, the poker queen of Ludlow Grange? Don’t be seely, dollink.”
She handed him a helter-skelter fistful of bills from her purse.
While he sorted through them for what he needed, she read what he had written on the placemat: Madam: You are suffering from reduced liver function and should see your doctor immediately. And I strongly advise you to stay away from the Civic Center tonight.
“Pretty stupid, I know,” Ralph said.
She kissed the tip of his nose. “Trying to help other people is never stupid.”
“Thanks. She won’t believe it, though. She’ll think we were pissed off about her button and her little speech in spite of what we said.
That what I wrote is just our weird way of trying to get our own back on her.”
“Maybe there’s a way to convince her otherwise.”
Lois fixed the waitress-who was standing hipshot by the kitchen pass-through and talking to the short-order cook while she drank a cup of coffee-with a look of dark concentration. As she did, Ralph saw Lois’s normal blue-gray aura deepen in color and draw inward, becoming a kind of body-hugging capsule.
He wasn’t exactly sure what was going on… but he could feel it.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood at attention; his forearms broken out in gooseflesh. She’s coming up, he thought, flipping the switches turning on all the turbines, and doing it on behalf of a woman she never saw before and she’ll probably never see again.
After a moment the waitress felt it, too. She turned to look at them as if she had heard her name called. Lois smiled casually and twiddled her fingers in a small wave, but when she spoke to Ralph, her voice was trembling with effort. “I’ve almost… almost got it.”
“Almost got what?”
“I don’t know. Whatever it is I need. It’ll come in a second.
Her name is Zoe, with two dots over the e. Go pay the check.
Distract her. Try to keep her from looking at me. It makes it harder.”
He did as she asked and was fairly successful in spite of the way Zoe kept trying to look over his shoulder at Lois. The first time she attempted to ring the check into the register, Zoe came up with a total of $234.20. She cleared the numbers with an impatient poke of her finger, and when she looked up at Ralph, her face was pale and her eyes were upset.
“What’s with your wife?” she asked Ralph. “I apologized, didn’t I? So why does she keep looking at me like that?”
Ralph knew Zoe couldn’t see Lois, because he was all but tapdancing in an effort to keep his body between the two of them, but he also knew she was right-Lois was staring.
He attempted to smile. “I don’t know what-”
The waitress jumped and shot a startled, irritated glance back at the short-order cook. “Quit banging those pots around” she shouted, although the only thing Ralph had heard from the kitchen was a radio playing elevator-music. Zoe looked back at Ralph. “Christ, it sounds like VietNam back there. Now if you could just tell your wife it’s not polite to-”
“To stare? She’s not. She’s really not.” Ralph stood aside. Lois had gone to the door and was looking out at the street with her back to them. “See?”
Zoe didn’t reply for several seconds, although she kept looking at Lois. At last she turned back at Ralph. “Sure. I see. Now why don’t you and her just make yourselves scarce?”
“All right-still friends?”
“Whatever you want,” Zoe said, but she wouldn’t look at him. When Ralph rejoined Lois, he saw that her aura had gone back to its former, more diffuse state, but it was much brighter than it had been.
“Still tired, Lois?” he asked her softly. “No. As a matter of fact, I feel fine now. Let’s go.” He started to open the door for her, then stopped. “Got my pen?”
“Gee, no-I guess it’s still on the table.” Ralph went over to pick it up. Below his note, Lois had added a P.S. in rolling Palmer-method script: In 1989 you had a baby and gave him up for adoption. Saint Anne’s, in Providence, R.I. Go and see your doctor before it’s too late, Zoe. No joke. No trick. We know what we’re talking about.
“Oh boy,” Ralph said as he rejoined her. “That’s going to scare the bejesus out of her.”
“If she gets to her doctor before her liver goes belly-up, I don’t care.”
He nodded and they went out.
“Did you get that stuff about her kid when you dipped into her’ aura?” Ralph asked as they crossed the leaf-strewn parking lot. Lois nodded. Beyond the lot, the entire east side of Derry was shimmering with bright, kaleidoscopic light. It was coming back hard now, very hard, that secret light cycling up and up. Ralph reached out and put his hand on the side of his car. Touching it was like tasting a slick, licorice-flavored cough-drop.
“I don’t think I took very much of her… her stuff,” Lois said, “but it was as if I swallowed all of her.”
Ralph remembered something he’d read in a science magazine not long ago. “If every cell in our bodies contains a complete blueprint of how we’re made,” he said, “why shouldn’t every bit of a person’s aura contain a complete blueprint of what we are?”
“That doesn’t sound very scientific, Ralph.”
“I suppose not.”
She squeezed his arm and grinned up at him. “It does sound about right, though.”
He grinned back at her, “You need to take some more, too,” she told him. “it still feels wrong to me-like stealing-but if you don’t, I think you’re going to pass right out on your feet.”
“As soon as I can. Right now all I want to do is get out to High Ridge.” Yet once he got behind the wheel, his hand faltered away from the ignition key almost as soon as he touched it.
“Ralph? What is it?”
“Nothing… everything. I can’t drive like this. I’ll wrap us around a telephone pole or drive us into somebody’s living room,” He looked up at the sky and saw one of those huge birds, this one transparent, roosting atop a satellite dish on the roof of an apartment house across the way. A thin, lemon-colored haze drifted up from its folded prehistoric wings.
Are you seeing a. t? a part of his mind asked doubtfully.
Are you sure of that, Ralph? Are you really, really sure?
I’m seeing it, all right. Fortunately or unfortunately I’m seeing it all… but if there was ever a right time to see such things, this isn’t it.