Journey to an 800 Number Read Online Free PDF

known cure. Actually she died of the chicken pox for which there is also no known cure. But people don’t usually die of chicken pox. It’s just that when you have Cockayne’s Syndrome you can’t fight off a simple childhood disease like the chicken pox because although she was only a child, she was about …” She started counting her fingers.”… about …”
    “Seventy-five years old.”
    “You good at math?” she asked.
    “Not bad,” I answered.
    “Where did you get the camel?”
    “I didn’t get it. It’s my father’s.”
    “Where did he get it?”
    I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
    “How can you not know?”
    “I think he had it before I was born.”
    “Haven’t you ever asked?”
    “No, I haven’t.”
    “Why?”
    “My mother and father are divorced.”
    “Aren’t everybody’s?”
    “But I live with my mother. This is the first time—ever—that I’ve stayed with my father. Except, of course, for the time before they divorced, and I hadn’t even started school then.”
    “Where do you live usually?”
    “Havemyer, Pennsylvania. It’s near Philadelphia. I’m going to go to Fortnum School in the fall. That’s a private school. College prep.”
    “I’ve been to a convention in Philadelphia.”
    “Did you go to the restaurant on the First Guaranty Bank Building? It’s a private club.”
    “No. Mother and I actually avoid those restaurants. The view is good, but not the food. Food-with-a-view. Besides, we had all the banquets and luncheons of municipal employees to attend.”
    “Municipal employees? I thought your motheris a travel agent. This is a convention of travel agents.”
    “My father was a municipal employee.”
    “I thought your mother and father are divorced.”
    “Now
they are,” she said. “Hungry?” she asked.
    I admitted that I was.
    She led the way across the room to where there was a long table set up with hors d’oeuvres and bowls of pretzels and nuts. We helped ourselves generously. I saw Father and Lilly talking to a small group of people. Father still did not look as if he belonged. Most of the men wore colored sports jackets. There appeared to be a lot of pink plaid. The women ran to rhinestone eyeglasses and bright blue chiffon, and three-fourths of them looked as if they had gone to the same beauty parlor. There were enough nests of curls on top of enough heads to make a bird sanctuary. Lilly, too, had one. She hadn’t had one at the restaurant.
    “Did your mother go to the beauty parlor?” I asked.
    Sabrina glanced up at Lilly and popped a cracker into her mouth and licked her forefinger and her thumb as daintily as if it were good manners. “It’s one of her wigs.”
    “One of them?”
    “Yep. She carries a supply. When we arrive at a convention, she reads the kind of people they are and puts on a fitting head.” She looked over the crowd.
    “She was right. Lilly always is. That is her once-a-week-and-spray-it-in-place hairdo. Very common among convention wives. Lilly likes to blend in with the crowd.”
    I wondered if my father could. I wondered if my father even realized that he didn’t.
    Sabrina asked me if I’d had enough to eat, and I told her that I had. “The hors d’oeuvres are usually better than the banquet,” she said.
    “You sound like you go to a lot of conventions.”
    “It’s a way of life,” she answered.
    We were back at the row of tables against the wall. We found an empty one. Empty except that there were six glasses on it and a puddle under each. Sabrina stacked them together and carried them to another empty table, took a napkin and wiped up the sweat rings and dumped that napkin on top of the stack of glasses. “Sit,” she invited. I did. “I’m going to go to exhibit hall tomorrow just to see your camel.”
    “My father’s camel.”
    “What’s its name?”
    “Ahmed.”
    “I would appreciate your finding out how your father got him.”
    “Are you going to write my father up in your collection of