“How can you see how Cam feels if he doesn’t have his phone, Daddy?” Sarah kind of gave him a hard look. She wasn’t being sarcastic. It was an honest question, which was sort of sad.
“There’s phones in the rooms of hospitals.”
She blinked. “Like phones? Really?”
“Yes, you remember when Daddy got hurt? They have phones in those rooms.” Bekka was trying so hard not to be evil.
“I thought those were just for the nurses and the people who brought you food.”
“Mostly.” He smiled at them, because they made him so happy. “But you can actually dial 9 to dial out, and you can get phone calls.”
“Wow.”
“I know, right? You know, when I was a little boy, every house had a phone like that. People didn’t have phones that you could just carry around if they weren’t really rich.”
“How did you look stuff up?” Bekka asked, and that was when the sarcasm hit because Sarah rolled her eyes like dice.
“Books. They used books.”
“We did. We had to use the school library a lot of times or the public library, and we used a lot of books to look things up — dictionaries, encyclopedias.”
Bekka’s eyes lit up. “Oh, Granny Halley has those in her house. She said that they were her momma and daddy’s. They’reold.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty cool.” He didn’t mock because to these little ones, the 1960s and 1970s were unimaginable.
Homes without microwaves or televisions with remotes or, hell, listening to his folks, they hadn’t even had air-conditioning until they were teenagers.
“Well, you should call him. If you call him right now, then we can talk to him.” And Sarah did love her Cam, maybe more than the other two…
“If I call him right now, then your little sister isn’t in here.”
“We would go get her. One of us. Probably.”
“Listen to you. I’m going to make it to where you can’t hang out with your Uncle Mark anymore if you don’t quit being sarcastic all the time.”
He could tell that Sarah wasn’t sure if she should be worried or not. He was fairly sure she wouldn’t even know what sarcasm was.
“I’m sorry. I just want to talk to Cam.”
“All right, baby.” He dialed the hospital and entered Cam’s room number.
It took a second, and then Cam answered the phone. “Hello?”
“Hey! I just wanted to let you know that I’ve got someone here who wants to talk to you. In fact, I’ve got two someones here.”
“Cool, let me talk to them.”
He put the phone on speaker. “Go ahead, girls, you’re on speaker.”
“Cam, are you okay? We miss you,” Bekka started, Sarah nodded and broke in when Bekka took a breath.
“I’ve been really good. I’ve been reading my book, and I went out and saw Fire twice in the arena lot and told them that you were okay and that you were coming to get him, and he was so unhappy, and he wants you to get better too.”
“Oh, honey, thank you. You be careful now. I don’t want you going in the trailer with him, especially if he’s grumpy.”
“Oh, I won’t. I promise. I just wanted him to know that it was okay and that no one was going to leave him here. Did you know there were two horses?”
Two horses? What?
