All I can hear now is Pop at the other end of the line, laughing his head off.
“So what’s so funny about that?”
“Nothing,” he says. “Nothing. Only now I can see what all the shouting was about at breakfast.”
“Oh.”
“O.K. Now mind you get that girl, as well as the bicycle of the brother who goes to college, home safe. Hear? I’ll tell your mother you narrowly escaped drowning, and she’ll probably save you a bone for dinner. O.K.?”
“O.K. Bye.”
Him and his jokes. Ha, ha, ha. Funny, though, him worrying about me getting Mary home safe, when her own mother doesn’t worry any.
We start along toward her house slowly, as there’s a good deal of traffic now. I’m wondering how to see Mary again without having to ask for her number and phoning and making a date. Something about telephoning I don’t like. Besides, I’d probably go out to a pay phone so the family wouldn’t listen, and that’d make me feel stupid to begin with.
Just then we start rounding the golf course, and I whack the handle bar of my bike and say, “Hey, that’s it!”
“What’s it?”