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“Great.” It cheered me to see him brightening.
“And, first thing, we’ll take a tour on a duck.”
“Great.”
“I’m not really tired, you know. Been up all night but I’m not really tired.”
“Me neither.”
“We’ll stay there tonight.”
“Great.” Tonight. It seemed so far way it might never come. I wouldn’t think about it.
“Ride the ducks,” said Elro, mopping a spot of egg yoke with a last piece of pancake.
The doorbell tinkled, and everyone looked up. A fat policeman in a broad-brimmed hat and blue uniform stood in the entrance. He nodded a few greetings, then walked over and sat at the table next to ours, setting h
is hat on the extra chair. His stomach pushed out against his shirt, exposing a small, hairy triangle of skin just above the belt buckle.
Elro stiffened and searched the room for the waitress. “Let’s pay,” he said. He took a worn leather wallet from his back pocket and set it on the table. From the corner of my eye, I could see that the cop was studying us. Elro squirmed and shoved his wallet around the table. The waitress had disappeared somewhere in back.
“It looks like it’s going to be hot again today,” I said, trying to make conversation to calm Elro.
“Yeah.” Elro ran his hands down the sides of his jeans and rocked up and back.
“Good for the corn.” The cop was still staring, so I turned to him and smiled. He had a wide, soft face, plain and unemotional. He nodded.
Finally, the waitress banged out of a door in back carrying a tray of plates. She distributed the food at a table on the other side of the room and then bustled over with coffee for the cop.
“Want something this morning, Stan?” she asked.
“Just coffee.”
“Yell if you change your mind.” She started to walk away.
“Hey!” said Elro, grabbing the hem of her smock. “We wanna pay.”
“All right, all right, but what’s your hurry? You got the whole day ahead of you.”
The bill came to sixty-five cents. Elro counted the coins out of a pocket in his wallet.
“Don’t forget the tip,” I whispered.
He frowned and took out another nickel. We both stood up to leave.
“Say, buster, come here,” the cop said.
Elro froze. His back formed a taut arc, and his arms were locked in strange angles at his sides. The cop was between him and the door, but I could sense that Elro was figuring the odds, betting he could sprint around the table and be out the door before the cop was out of his seat. What about me, though? I was already close enough to be within grabbing distance. If Elro bolted, I’d be trapped. Reaching out, I snatched Elro’s hand. “Come on, dear,” I said, trying to sound peppy. “It’s only a policeman.”
Elro lifted his arm hopelessly, as if discovering that the fingers twisting through his were an iron chain. Then we shuffled the few feet over to the cop’s table.
“There somethin’ wrong, buster?” the cop demanded. He talked by jiggling his cheeks. His lips hardly moved.
“No.”
“ ‘Cause if there’s somethin’ wrong, we want to know about it.”
“No, sir, nothin’ wrong.”
