My Hero by Mary McBride

could get a word in edgewise, Cal told her that he'd slept in his car rather than drive home after one too many beers.
    “Well, that's a first,” she said, segueing smoothly into a tirade on the derelicts who frequented Ramon's, himself included.
    Ellie tapped him on the shoulder. “Coffee?” she whispered.
    Cal nodded.
    “What are you doing at Ellie's so early?” Ruth asked.
    Good question. He hadn't framed an alibi yet, so he responded with the first excuse that came into his head. “I'm taking Holly Hicks out for breakfast.”
    “I hear she's been asking a lot of people a lot of questions,” his sister said in the same tone she might have used if she'd said
I hear the woman murdered both her parents with an axe.
    “Yeah. I guess that's part of her job. Asking questions.”
    “Well, I just hope she doesn't get answers that are going to embarrass us.”
    He mumbled noncommittally. As far as he was concerned, embarrassment was pretty much a given with this Hero Week deal. For him, anyway.
    Ellie put a steaming mug of coffee in his hand and he sipped it while Ruthie went through a litany of Griffin embarrassments, including their father's penchant for alcohol and loose women, Cal's hell raising in high school, his brief, misguided marriage and his current state of limbo. He was getting like Dooley, he thought. Allowing her complaints to go in one ear and out the other without having much effect in the middle other than to induce a dull throb. When she finally hung up, Cal had a full-fledged headache.
    While Ellie poured a topper into his mug, she shook her head. “That sister of yours has a terrible tongue,” she said, “but she means well, Cal. She worries about you.”
    “That she does,” he said with a beleaguered sigh. It was what he'd come home for, after all. Somebody to worry about him. Somebody who loved him enough to worry.
    “So you're taking Holly to breakfast?” Ellie asked.
    He nodded. “That was the plan. Is she up yet?”
    “She's up.” That unique blend of East Coast cool and hot chili peppers sounded just behind him.
    Cal turned slowly, forestalling an attack of vertigo, but the sight of Holly Hicks alone almost made him dizzy. Her snug jeans and tee of yesterday had been replaced by a soft pink bathrobe that clung in all the right places. Until this moment he'd merely thought of her as tiny. Now the word “luscious” came to mind. With her face scrubbed clean of makeup and her hair damp from the shower, she was the very definition of “natural beauty.” Unlike him, he thought, as he ran a couple fingertips across his unshaven jaw.
    “Morning,” he said as if he hadn't seen her in hours, as if he hadn't almost kissed her just a few minutes ago. Right now he wished he had. “If seven's too early, I can come back.”
    “Seven's perfect,” she said. “I'm starving. It'll just take me two minutes to get dressed. Where are we going?”
    Ellie laughed. “Take your pick. The Longhorn Café or the Longhorn Café.”
    The Longhorn Café lived up to its name. It was quintessential Texas with horns and antlers decorating its shellacked knotty pine walls, along with horseshoes, branding irons, and Lone Star flags. The branding iron motif was repeated on the brown and beige curtains and on the greasy laminated menu.
    Cal had been strangely quiet on their walk from Ellie's, leading Holly to suppose that he wasn't a morning person.
    “What do you recommend?” she asked him, peering over the top of the menu.
    “Anything but the biscuits and gravy,” he said, “unless you enjoy walking around all morning feeling like you've just eaten wet concrete.”
    She gave a little shudder. That was how she'd felt every morning for her first sixteen years after eating her mother's biscuits and gravy. “Maybe I'll just have a bagel and coffee.”
    A blond waitress in a brown and beige uniform that matched the curtains stopped at their table. “Coffee, y'all?” she asked, holding out a full glass