Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [224]
'I'm sorry I said the s-word, Naomi,' he told her now. He spoke humbly, although he doubted somehow that Naomi was even half as priggish as she liked to sound. 'What I mean to say is that if you don't take that twenty, I'll feel like caca-poopie.'
She tucked the bill into her purse and then endeavored to look at him with an expression of dignified primness. She almost made it ... but the corners of her lips quivered slightly.
'There. Satisfied?'
'Short of giving you fifty,' he said. 'Would you take fifty, Omes?'
'No,' she said. 'And please don't call me Omes. You know I don't like it.'
'I'm sorry.'
'Apology accepted. Now why don't we just drop the subject?'
'Okay,' Sam said agreeably.
'I heard several people say your speech was good. Craig Jones just raved about it. Do you really think that's the reason you've done more business?'
'Does a bear - ' Sam began, and then retraced his steps. 'Yes. I do. Things work that way sometimes. It's funny, but it's true. The old sales graph has really spiked this week. It'll drop back, of course, but I don't think it'll drop back all the way. If the new folks like the way I do business - and I like to think they will - there'll be a carry-over.'
Sam leaned back in his chair, laced his hands together behind his neck, and looked thoughtfully up at the ceiling.
'When Craig Jones called up and put me on the spot, I was ready to shoot him. No joke, Naomi.'
'Yes,' she said. 'You looked like a man coming down with a bad case of poison ivy.'
'Did I?' He laughed. 'Yeah, I suppose so. It's funny how things work out sometimes - purest luck. If there is a God, it makes you wonder sometimes if He tightened all the screws in the big machine before He set it going.'
He expected Naomi to scold him for his irreverence (it wouldn't be the first time), but she didn't take the gambit today. Instead she said, 'You're luckier than you know, if the books you got at the Library really did help You out. It usually doesn't open until five o'clock on Fridays. I meant to tell you that, but then I forgot.'
'Oh?'
'You must have found Mr Price catching up on his paperwork or something.'
'Price?' Sam asked. 'Don't you mean Mr Peckham? The newspaper-reading janitor?'
Naomi shook her head. 'The only Peckham I ever heard of around here was old Eddie Peckham, and he died years ago. I'm talking about Mr Price. The librarian.' She was looking at Sam as though he were the thickest man on earth ... or at least in Junction City, Iowa. 'Tall man? Thin? About fifty?'
'Nope,' Sam said. 'I got a lady named Lortz. Short, plump, somewhere around the age when women form lasting attachments to bright-green polyester.'
A rather strange mix of expressions crossed Naomi's face - surprise was followed by suspicion; suspicion was followed by a species of faintly exasperated amusement. That particular sequence of expressions almost always indicates the same thing: someone is coming to realize that his or her leg is being shaken vigorously. Under more ordinary circumstances Sam might have wondered about that, but he had done a land-office business all week long, and as a result he had a great deal of his own paperwork to catch up on. Half of his mind had already wandered off to examine it.
'Oh,' Naomi said and laughed. 'Miss Lortz, was it? That must have been fun.'
'She's peculiar, all right,' Sam said.
'You bet,' Naomi agreed. 'In fact she's absolutely-'
If she had finished what she had started to say she probably would have startled Sam Peebles a great deal, but luck - as he had just pointed out - plays an absurdly important part in human affairs, and luck now intervened.
The telephone rang.
It was Burt Iverson, the spiritual