Journey to an 800 Number Read Online Free PDF Page A

excuse the expression—breast was a tag that said: HELLO . I’m Sabrina Pacsek. The Sabrina Pacsek was handwritten; the rest was printed.
    “Well, hi there,” I said.
    She looked at me and said, “Oh, hello.”
    “Remember me,” I said. “The restaurant this morning.” I pointed to Father. “He has the camel you like.”
    “Oh, yes,” Sabrina said. “What are you doinghere? I thought I saw the camel’s truck hitched to a house trailer.”
    “You did,” I answered.
    “We came here to eat. Father and I are connoisseurs of fine food. We enjoy eating at the better establishments whenever we arrive in a city that has one.”
    “So you’re both gourmets,” she said, studying Father. I could tell that she knew that he wasn’t.
    “We like good food,” Father said.
    Sabrina said, “I hope you’ll excuse me. Mother is expecting me. There was a mix-up with our convention registration. Mother is at the convention desk straightening it out now.”
    Father said, “We’ll go with you. I’d like to say hello to Lilly.”
    Sabrina started to protest, but Father put a hand between her shoulder blades and steered her around. Around the corner was Lilly, bending over a row of tables that had a long felt cover over them. Lilly was talking to a man who sat behind a stack of folders, and a woman who sat behind a stack of envelopes. She was saying, “That’s perfectly all right, Mr. Hogarth. Mistakes do happen.”
    The woman behind the stack of envelopes had a pair of eyeglasses on a chain. She put them on, looked through their bottoms and examined the HELLO badge she handed Lilly. “How do you pronounce your name?” She asked.
    “Pah-check,” Lilly answered, pinning the badgejust north of her bosom. “It’s Czechoslovakian.”
    “Well, Mrs. Pacsek, I’m glad you had that letter.”
    “So am I. Sabrina, my daughter, is … Oh! here she is now.”
    Sabrina had edged her way over to her mother’s side. “Mother,” she said, “look who I ran into in the elevator.”
    Lilly turned toward us, smiled and said, “How delightful!” She said to the woman with the glasses on a chain, “Please excuse us. Some old friends have arrived.”
    “How nice that your daughter will have someone her own age to keep her company.”
    “Why, yes,” Lilly said, turning around and fitting herself between Father and me. She reached an arm across each of our backs. “Let’s go in to the opening reception and toast our reunion.”
    And before we could do much about it, she had one of her hands between each pair of shoulder blades and was pushing Father and me toward a large room that opened off the lobby. She let the pressure off my back as soon as we got inside the entrance to the room. She said to Sabrina, “It’ll be an open bar, dear. You can fetch you and Maximilian a Coke. Mr. Stubbs and I will meet you back by this door about five minutes before the banquet.”
    The light in the room was not too good, but even before Sabrina returned with our Cokes, I noticed that we were the only two non-adults in theroom. And I noticed something else that I mentioned to Sabrina. “Why does everyone except you and your mother have his name badge printed instead of written by hand?”
    “That was the mix-up over the registration,” she said. “They had forgotten to put badges in our Conference Kits, so we had to write ours by hand.”
    We sat down at one of the small tables that they had set up along the back edge of the room. “Heard anything more about Renee?” I asked.
    “No. There wasn’t anything in the Dallas paper about her. But there was one thing worth clipping.”
    “What was that?”
    “About this five-year-old girl who died an old woman.”
    “How can a five-year-old die an old woman?”
    “A disease called Cockayne Syndrome made her age at the rate of fifteen years for every year she lived.”
    “I don’t believe it.”
    “You better. I have the clipping in our room. C-O-C-K-A-Y-N-E Syndrome. There’s no