hens to roost every night to earn money for your first guitar.â
I began to giggle.
âDonât giggle,â the skinny one said. âThis is serious. I get paid twenty-two thousand dollars a year to do this. All right, what about a family? You need a family. Whatâs your mother like?â
âSheâs dead. She died a long time ago.â
âShe wonât work out, then, will she?â the round one said. âWhat about your old man? Maybe if he was dead too, we could sell you as an orphanâthatâs always good for a tug at the heart strings. Growing up with your mean aunt who took away your guitar so you had to sneak out into the woodshed and practice at night.â
âGeorge Stable, The Orphan Next Door doesnât sing,â the skinny one said.
âAnyway, my fatherâs alive,â I said.
âToo bad,â the round one said. âThat eliminates the orphan bit, anyway. Whatâs he do, your old man?â
âHeâs a comic strip artist. He draws Frankens-Teen.â
âToo sophisticated,â the skinny one said, worriedly. âWe canât possibly have that. Heâd better be a dentist.â
âDentists make too much dough,â the round one said. âHow about heâs a street cleaner? Do they have street cleaners up there in Pawling?â
âI donât think so,â I said.
âThey must have street cleaners,â the skinny one said. âOtherwise how do they keep the streets clean?â
âCome on, dummy,â the round one said. âThe Boy Scouts clean it up. Right, George?â
âI donât really know,â I said. âI guess they donât throw so much stuff around as we do here in New York.â
âThatâs a fair bet,â the skinny one said.
âBoy Scouts,â the round one said. âHmm. Maybe his old man is the Pawling scoutmaster.â
âThatâs fairly tasty,â the skinny one said. âLetâs put some butter on it.â
âWonât the real scoutmaster get sore?â I asked.
âNaw,â the round one said. âWe give him an autographed record if he promises to keep his mouth shut.â
That was the way it went. In the end they made Pop a carpenter, because carpenters reflect the sturdy, independent qualities for which country people are famous. They gave me a regular mother, and invented a whole lot of stuff about pitching hay and roasting apples. By the end of it I wasnât George Stable anymore, I was somebody else. So was Pop: I wondered what he was going to say about being a carpenter in Pawling.
The publicity conferences were only a part of it. There were conferences on my clothes and conferences on whether I ought to work in night clubs or just in concerts and conferences on how the records would be promoted and a lot of other things. Superman was at a lot of these conferences, and a couple of times he brought up about that chat we were supposed to have over at his apartment.
I kept stalling. I didnât have any reason for stalling; I mean he wasnât going to hurt me or anything. I just didnât like being around him too much, with his blue egg-eyes always staring and those huge strong arms and shoulders he got from walking on crutches all his life. But it was hard to keep stalling. And one day, as we were coming out of a conference he said, âHey, Georgie, what about dropping by my place tomorrow afternoon around six?â
I blushed. âGee, I canât Superman,â I said. âUncle Ned is taking us all to a drive-in that night.â
âOkay,â he said. He stared at me with those blue egg-eyes. âWhat about next week?â
There wasnât much of a way to get out of it. âWell, I guess that would be all right,â I said. âOnly I have to check with Uncle Ned first.â
âItâs a deal, then,â he said. As far as I was concerned, though, it
C. J. Cherryh
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