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file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htmbreakfast (Cocoa Bears). After breakfast she went silently upstairs and got into the dress and shoesRachel had laid out for her. She had brought the picture of her pulling Gage on her sled to the airportwith her, and she sat calmly in one of the plastic contour seats in the lower lobby while Louis stood inline for their tickets and the loudspeaker blared intelligence of arriving and departing flights.Mr. and Mrs. Goldman showed up forty minutes before flight time. Irwin Goldman was natty (andapparently sweatless) in a cashmere topcoat in spite of the sixty-degree temperatures; he went over tothe Avis desk to check his car in while Dory Goldman sat with Rachel and Effie.Louis and Goldman joined the others at the same time. Louis was a bit afraid that there might be areprise of the my son, my son playlet, but he was spared. Goldman contented himself with a rather limphandshake and a muttered hello. The quick, embarrassed glance he afforded his son-in-law confirmedthe certainty Louis had awakened with this morning: the man must have been drunk.They went upstairs on the escalator and sat in the boarding lounge, not talking much. Dory Goldmanthumbed nervously at her copy of an Erica Jong novel but did not open it. She kept glancing, a littlenervously, at the picture Ellie was holding.Louis asked his daughter if she would like to walk over to the bookstore with him and pick outsomething to read on the plane.Ellie had been looking at him in that speculative way again. Louis didn’t like it. It made him nervous.“Will you be good at Grandma and Grandda’s?” he asked her as they walked over.“Yes,” she said. “Daddy, will the truant officer get me? Andy Pasioca says there’s a truant officer and hegets school skippers.”“Don’t you worry about the truant officer,” he said. “I’ll take care of the school, and you can start againin the fall with no trouble.”“I hope I’ll be okay in the fall,” Ellie said. “I never was in a grade before. Only kindergarten. I don’tknow what kids do in grades. Homework, probably.”“You’ll be fine.”“Daddy, are you still pissed off at Grandda?”He gaped at her. “Why in the world would you think I was that I didn’t like your grandda, Effie?”She shrugged as if the topic held no particular interest for her. “When you talk about him, you alwaysfile:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20St...20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htm (244 of 333)7/28/2005 9:21:50 PM