At home, he was greeted with a perfunctory kiss at the door.
"Honey," Lois told him, "you took the check book, and I didn't have any money."
"Something come up? I'm sorry."
"We're all out of milk. The milk man didn't come today. Their homogenizing machinery broke down. I phoned the dairy about nine; and then, of course, the phone has been on the blink since about eleven or a little before, so I couldn't ask you to bring some home."
"I kept trying to get you."
"I figured you had to work late again, when you weren't here at six, and I knew you'd be here when you got here."
Eddie sat down and she sat on the chair arm beside him. "How did it go today?"
He started to tell her about the wage cut and Ramon Lopez; but then he didn't want to talk about it. "So-so," he said. "There was an outage over in the Silver Lake Area just before I left."
"Fixed yet?"
"I doubt it," he said. "Probably a couple of more hours."