“Any time you’re ready.”
Joe had never known it was possible to feel so good. “I’ll be ready Monday.”
Tom Carlin knocked ashes from his pipe and refilled the bowl. “I found a script in your bureau, Joe,” he said serenely.
Joe sat up straight.
“I had copies made and brought the script back. I saw no use talking to you until I had something to talk about. I wrote to five publishers—four in New York and one in Boston. Three are willing to pay a fair share of the cost on a dramatization of their books. One is doubtful, and one is definitely unfavorable.”
Joe’s voice was eager. “Are we going on the air?”
The man caught that “we.” “I’m more than half convinced we’ll have a Carlin show next September.”
Joe went hot and cold. Not because this was radio, but because it was Thomas Carlin Presents.
Tom Carlin puffed his contentment. “Every day we have customers who telephone and ask to have some purchase delivered at once. That forces me to take a clerk from behind the counter and send him out. I’ve been thinking of hiring somebody to take care of some light work and make these deliveries. This Pop Bartell. Do you think he could fit into that job after forty years of show business?”
Joe was hot and cold again. “After what happened to-day, Dad, he’d think somebody had given him a piece of Heaven.”