Free Round Robin by Joseph Flynn

“Miss Piggy’s body double.”
    Tone was glad to see his camera guy had gotten that one. He’d paid a kid at Second City fifty bucks to write that line for him. He had a half dozen more in his pocket.
    Mimi just gave him a hard stare.
    “Ah-ah,” Tone said. “That’s against the rules.”
    He pointed to the anti-Travis Bickle injunction on the register.
    “Maybe I should write a rule against those things,” Mimi said, jerking her thumb at the cameraman, who reflexively leaped a yard backward.
    “What?” Tone asked. “Every time I come in with somebody, you’re going to write a rule against it? Keep that up and nobody’s going to have much fun around here anymore.”
    Mimi looked around and saw that Tone had actually scored a point with her customers. She couldn’t just keeping changing the rules. She’d come across as too high-handed. Afraid to get in there and trade punches. But to let this idiot back her into a corner—she wanted to spit.
    Finally, Mimi said, “Robin’s not here today.”
    “What?”
    Tone seemed genuinely distressed. Then he thought he smelled a rat.
    “She’s in the kitchen, right? Camera shy. Afraid to face me for the record.”
    Tone felt a deep satisfaction that all his accusations were being captured on Memorex.
    “She hurt her ankle,” Mimi said. “She’s at the doctor and then she’s going home.”
    “You’re kidding?”
    Mimi said she wasn’t, and a guy eating a Reuben backed her up. Goof didn’t even know enough to stop chewing while he was being taped. The guy’d make a good insert shot. Laugh’s on you, dummy.
    Still, Tone was seriously disappointed that fate had gummed up his plans. Now, the stories about his ... shortcomings ... would keep eating away at his reputation, threaten his position in the local TV scene. The only thing he could do was to fall back on one of his most important tools. The sports cliche.
    “Okay,” he said sternly, “but you tell Robin Phinney I’ll be back.” Then Tone turned to look straight into the camera. “She can run but she can’t hide.”
    Tone drew a finger across his throat to tell the cameraman to stop taping, and he stomped out of the deli.
     
    Dan Phinney hadn’t been able to find a single guy who owed him a favor, still lived in town, and was someone he’d trust to work in his daughter’s house. The older guys, who knew their stuff and how to behave themselves, had all retired and moved to Florida or Arizona. The younger guys were still around, on the job, but Dan didn’t think much of their work ethic, their competence or their manners. You never knew how young guys today would treat a woman. They didn’t seem to have the same upbringing his generation had. He was uneasy that one of these young guys might make a crack about Robin’s appearance or something, hurt her feelings.
    Which, he had to admit, didn’t seem too likely if you ever saw the way she fielded the brickbats thrown her way at Mimi’s. But that was different. That was her job, and Dan was sure that it was an act. It was how Robin protected herself from people ... and from her memories.
    But Dan knew different.
    Robin was his little girl. He remembered her when she’d been young and lovely—before she’d been hurt—and she’d always be his angel. He took out his wallet and looked at the picture of Robin he kept there. She’d been eighteen when it was taken, a month after her graduation from high school. The image just about stopped his heart every time he looked at it, she’d been so lovely.
    Of course, given his medical history, stopping his heart wasn’t such a good idea. He folded up his wallet and stuck it back in his pocket.
    Dan Phinney still blamed himself for letting his little girl get hurt. He didn’t know how the hell he could have prevented it, it all happened so fast. But he should have been there for Robin, stopped that sonofabitch from ever getting close to his daughter. That’s what fathers were for, and it ate at him