Now she was crying, crying and rooting through her purse in search of a Kleenex in that half-annoying, half-endearing way she had. He handed her his handkerchief and she used it to wipe her eyes.
'You can say what you want, you can be mean, you can cross-examine me if you want, Billy, you can even spoil the time we just had. But I love you and I'm going to say what I have to say. When people start to lose weight even though they're not on a diet, it can mean they're sick. It's one of the seven warning signs of cancer.' She thrust his handkerchief back at him. His fingers touched hers as he took it. Her hand was very cold.
Well, the word was out. Cancer. Rhymes with dancer and You just shit your pants, sir. God knew the word had bobbed up in his own mind more than once since getting on the penny scale in front of the shoe store. It had bobbed up like some evil clown's dirty balloon and he had turned away from it. He had turned away from it the way you turned away from the bag ladies who sat rocking back and forth in their strange, sooty little nooks outside the Grand Central Station ... or the way you turned away from the capering Gypsy children who had come with the rest of the Gypsy band. The Gypsy children sang in voices that somehow managed to be both monotonous and strangely sweet at the same time. The Gypsy children walked on their hands with tambourines outstretched, held somehow by their bare dirty toes. The Gypsy children juggled. The Gypsy children put the local Frisbee jocks to shame by spinning two, sometimes three of the plastic disks at the same time - on fingers, on thumbs, sometimes on noses. They laughed while they did all those things, and they all seemed to have skin diseases or crossed eyes or harelips. When you suddenly found such a weird combination of agility and ugliness thrust in front of you, what else was there to do but turn away? Bag ladies, Gypsy children, and cancer. Even the skittery run of his thoughts frightened him.
Still, it was maybe better to have the word out.
'I've felt fine,' he repeated, for maybe the sixth time since the night Heidi had asked him if he felt quite well. And, dammit, it was true! 'Also, I've been exercising.'
That was also true ... of the last five days, anyway. They had made it up the Labyrinth Trail together, and although he'd had to exhale all the way and suck in his gut to get through a couple of the tightest places, he'd never come even close to getting stuck. In fact, it had been Heidi, puffing and out of breath, who'd needed to ask for a rest twice. Billy had diplomatically not mentioned her cigarette jones.
'I'm sure you've felt fine,' she said, 'and that's great. But a checkup would be great, too. You haven't had one in over eighteen months, and I bet Dr Houston misses you -'
'I think he's a little dope freak,' Halleck muttered.
'A little what?'
'Nothing.'
'But I'm telling you, Billy, you can't lose almost twenty pounds in two weeks just by exercising.'
'I am not sick!'
'Then just humor me.'
They rode the rest of the way to Fairview in silence. Halleck wanted to pull her to him and tell her sure, okay, he would do what she wanted. Except a thought had come to him. An utterly absurd thought. Absurd but nevertheless chilling.
Maybe there's a new style in old Gypsy curses, friends and neighbors - how about that possibility? They used to change you into a werewolf or send a demon to pull Off your head in the middle of the night, something like that, but everything changes, doesn't it? What if that old man touched me and gave me cancer? She's right, it's one of the tattletales - losing twenty pounds just like that is like when the miners' canary drops dead in his cage. Lung cancer.
leukemia ... melanoma ...
It was crazy, but the craziness didn't keep the thought away: What if he touched me and gave me cancer?
Linda greeted them with extravagant kisses and, to their mutual amazement, produced a very creditable lasagna from the oven and served it on paper plates bearing the face of that lasagna-lover extraordinaire, Garfield the cat. She asked them how their second honeymoon had been ('A phrase that belongs right up there with second childhood,' Halleck observed dryly to Heidi that evening, after the dishes had been done and Linda had gone flying off with two of her girlfriends to continue a Dungeons and Dragons game that had been going on for nearly a year), and before they could do more than begin to tell her about the trip, she had cried, 'Oh, that reminds me!' and spent the rest of the meal regaling them with Tales of Wonder and Horror from Fairview Junior High - a continuing story which held more fascination for her than it did for either Halleck or his wife, although both tried to listen with attention. They had been gone for almost a week, after all.
As she rushed out, she kissed Halleck's cheek loudly and cried, "Bye, skinny!'
Halleck watched her mount her bike and pedal down the front walk, ponytail flying, and then turned to Heidi. He was dumbfounded.
'Now,' she said, 'will you please listen to me?'
'You told her. You called ahead and told her to say that. Female conspiracy.'
'No.'