“She put back the receiver and lifted it again. She asked for the number of Niall’s room at the theater. She went on ringing. And surely, she thought with sudden hopelessness and a new kind of dead despair, they can’t both be out and away, now at this minute in my life, when I need both of them so much? Surely one of them will come, surely one of them will help me? Because I don’t want to go home alone. I don’t want to be in the house alone, without Pappy.”
