A Spool of Blue Thread

10

EVERY GROUND-FLOOR ROOM but the kitchen had double pocket doors, and above each door was a fretwork transom for the air to circulate in the summer. The windows were fitted so tightly that not even the fiercest winter storm could cause them to rattle. The second-floor hall had a chamfered railing that pivoted neatly at the stairs before descending to the entrance hall. All the floors were aged chestnut. All the hardware was solid brass — doorknobs, cabinet knobs, even the two-pronged hooks meant to anchor the cords of the navy-blue linen window shades that were brought down from the attic every spring. A ceiling fan with wooden blades hung in each room upstairs and down, and out on the porch there were three. The fan above the entrance hall had a six-and-a-half-foot wingspan.

Mrs. Brill had wanted a chandelier in the entrance hall — a glittery one, all crystal, shaped like an upside-down wedding cake. Silly woman. Junior had dissuaded her by pointing out the impracticality: any time the tiniest cobweb was spotted trailing from a prism, he would need to send a workman over with a sixteen-foot stepladder. (He failed to disclose that for another client, he had once designed an ingenious cable-and-winch lift system to raise and lower a chandelier at will.) His main objection, of course, was that a chandelier would not have been in keeping with the house. This was a plain house, in the way that a handcrafted blanket chest is plain — simple, but impeccably built, as Junior, who had built it, should know. He had overseen every detail, setting his hand to every part of it except those parts that somebody else could do better, like the honeycombing of tiny black-and-white ceramic tiles in the bathroom, laid by two brothers from Little Italy who didn’t speak any English. The stairway, though, with the newel posts running clean through the hand-cut openings in the treads, and those pocket doors that glided almost silently into their respective walls: those were Junior’s. He was a brash and hasty man in all other areas of life, a man who coasted through stop signs without so much as a toe on the brake, a man who bolted his food and guzzled his drinks and ordered a stammering child to “come on, spit it out,” but when it came to constructing a house he had all the patience in the world.

Mrs. Brill had also wanted velvet-flocked wallpaper in the living room, fitted carpets in the bedrooms, and red-and-blue stained glass in the fanlight above the front door. None of which she got. Ha! Junior won just about every argument. Mostly, as with the chandelier, he cited impracticalities, but when he needed to he was not averse to bringing up the issue of taste. “Now, I don’t know why, Mrs. Brill,” he would say, “but that is just not done. The Remingtons didn’t do that, nor the Warings, either”—naming two families in Guilford whom Mrs. Brill especially admired. Then Mrs. Brill would retreat—“Well, you know best, I suppose”—and Junior would proceed as he had originally intended. This was the house of his life, after all (the way a different type of man would have a love of his life), and against any sort of logic he clung to the conviction that he would someday be living here. Even after the Brills moved in and their cluttery decorations choked the airy rooms, he remained serenely optimistic. And when Mrs. Brill started talking about how isolated she felt, how far from downtown, when she went to pieces after she found those burglar tools in the sunroom, he heard the click of his world settling into its rightful place. At last, the house would be his.

As it had been all along, really.

Sometimes, in the weeks when he was sprucing the place up before he installed his family, he drove over in the early morning just to take a walk-through, to relish the thrillingly empty rooms and the non-squeaking floorboards and the sturdy faucet handles above the bathroom sink. (Mrs. Brill had wanted handles she’d seen in a Paris hotel, faceted crystal knobs the size of Ping-Pong balls. In Junior’s opinion, though, the only sensible design was a chubby white porcelain cross — easiest to turn with soapy fingers — and for once Mr. Brill had spoken up and agreed with him.)

He liked to gaze up the stairs and imagine his daughter sweeping down them, an elegant young woman in a white satin wedding gown. He envisioned the dining-room table lined with a double row of grandchildren, mostly boys, his son’s boys to carry on the Whitshank name. They would all have their faces turned in Junior’s direction, like sunflowers turned to the sun, listening to him hold forth on some educational topic. Maybe he could assign a topic each night at the start of the meal — music, or art, or current events. A ham or perhaps a roast goose would sit in front of him waiting to be carved, and the water would be served in stemmed goblets, and the salad forks would have been refrigerated ahead of time as he had observed the maid doing in the Remingtons’ house in Guilford.

Everything till now had been makeshift — his ragtag upbringing, his hidey-hole courtship, his limping-along marriage, and his shabby little rented house in a rundown neighborhood. But now that was about to change. His real life could begin.

Then Linnie Mae had to go and interfere with the porch swing.

In the Brills’ time, the porch swing had been an ugly white wrought-iron affair featuring sharp-edged curlicues that gouged a person’s spine. Its rust-pocked figure-eight hooks made a screechy, complaining sound, and the heavy chains could seriously pinch your fingers if you gripped them wrong. But Mrs. Brill had swung in that swing as a little girl, she’d told Junior, and it was clear from the lingering way she spoke how fondly she looked back on that little girl, how she cherished the notion of her cute little childhood self. So Junior had had to allow it.

When the Brills moved out, they left behind all their porch furniture because they were going to an apartment. Mrs. Brill told Junior, in a sad little voice, to be sure and look after her swing, and Junior said, “Yes, ma’am, I’ll certainly do that.” The moment they were gone, though, he climbed up on a ladder and unhooked the swing himself. He knew what he wanted in its stead: a plain wooden bench swing varnished in a honey tone, with a row of lathed spindles forming the back and supporting each armrest. It should hang by special ropes that were whiter and softer than ordinary ropes, easier on the hands, and when it moved there should be no sound at all, or at most just a genteel creak such as he imagined you would hear from the sails on a sailboat. He had seen such a swing back home, at Mr. Muldoon’s. Mr. Muldoon managed the mica mines, and his house had a long front porch with varnished floorboards, and the steps were varnished as well, and so was the swing.

Junior couldn’t find this swing ready-made and he had to commission one. It cost a fortune. He didn’t tell Linnie how much. She asked, because money was an issue; the down payment on the house had just about ruined them. But he said, “What difference does it make? There’s not a chance on this earth I would live in a place with a white lace swing out front.”

It arrived raw, as he’d specified, so that it could be finished to the shade he envisioned. He had Eugene, his best painter, see to that. Another of his men spliced the ropes to the heavy brass hardware, a fellow from the Eastern Shore who knew how such things were done. (And who whistled when he saw the brass, but Junior had his own private hoard and it was not his fault there was a war on.) When the swing was hung, finally — the grain of the wood shining through the varnish, the white ropes silky and silent — he felt supremely satisfied. For once, something he’d dreamed of had turned out exactly as he had planned.

Up to this point, Linnie Mae had barely visited the house. She just didn’t seem as excited about it as Junior was. He couldn’t understand that. Most women would be jumping up and down! But she had all these quibbles: too expensive, too hoity-toity, too far from her girlfriends. Well, she would come around. He wasn’t going to waste his breath. But once the swing was hung he was eager for her to see it, and the next Sunday morning he suggested taking her and the kids to the house in the truck after they got back from church. He didn’t mention the swing because he wanted it to kind of dawn on her. He just pointed out that since it was only a couple of weeks till moving day, maybe she’d like to carry over a few of those boxes she’d been packing. Linnie said, “Oh, all right.” But after church she started dragging her heels. She said why didn’t they eat dinner first, and when he told her they could eat after they got back she said, “Well, I’ll need to change out of my good clothes, at least.”

“What do you want to do that for?” he asked. “Go like you are.” He hadn’t brought it up yet, but he was thinking that after they’d moved in, Linnie should give more thought to how she dressed. She dressed like the women back home dressed. And she sewed most of her clothes herself, as well as the children’s. There was something thick-waisted and bunchy, he had noticed, about everything that his children wore.

But Linnie said, “I am not lugging dusty old boxes in my best outfit.” So he had to wait for her to change and to put the kids in their play clothes. He himself kept his Sunday suit on, though. Until now their future neighbors, if they ever peeked out their windows (and he would bet they did), would have seen him only in overalls, and he wanted to show his better side to them.

In the truck, Merrick sat between Junior and Linnie while Redcliffe perched on Linnie’s lap. Junior chose the prettiest streets to drive down, so as to show them off to Linnie. It was April and everything was in bloom, the azaleas and the redbud and the rhododendron, and when they reached the Brills’ house — the Whitshanks’ house! — he pointed out the white dogwood. “Maybe when we’re moved in you could plant yourself some roses,” he told Linnie, but she said, “I can’t grow roses in that yard! It’s nothing but shade.” He held his tongue. He parked down front, although with all they had to unload it would have made more sense to park in back, and he got out of the truck and waited for her to lift the children out, meanwhile staring up at the house and trying to see it through her eyes. She had to love it. It was a house that said “Welcome,” that said “Family,” that said “Solid people live here.” But Linnie was heading toward the rear of the truck where the boxes were. “Forget about those,” Junior told her. “We’ll see to them in a minute. I want you to come on up and get to know your new house.”

He set a hand on the small of her back to guide her. Merrick took his other hand and walked next to him, and Redcliffe toddled behind with his homemade wooden tractor rattling after him on a string. Linnie said, “Oh, look, they left behind their porch furniture.”

“I told you they were doing that,” he said.

“Did they charge you for it?”

“Nope. Said I could have it for free.”

“Well, that was nice.”

He wasn’t going to point out the swing. He was going to wait for her to notice it.

There was a moment when he wondered if she would notice — she could be very heedless, sometimes — but then she came to a stop, and he stopped too and watched her taking it in. “Oh,” she said, “that swing’s real pretty, Junior.”

“You like it?”

“I can see why you would favor it over wrought iron.”

He slid his hand from the small of her back to cup her waist, and he pulled her closer. “It’s a sight more comfortable, I’ll tell you that,” he said.

“What color you going to paint it?”

“What?”

“Could we paint it blue?”

“Blue!” he said.

“I’m thinking a kind of medium blue, like a … well, I don’t know what shade exactly you would call it, but it’s darker than baby blue, and lighter than navy. Just a middling blue, you know? Like a … maybe they call it Swedish blue. Or … is there such a thing as Dutch blue? No, maybe not. My aunt Louise had a porch swing the kind of blue I’m thinking of; my uncle Guy’s wife. They lived over in Spruce Pine in this cute little tiny house. They were the sweetest couple. I used to wish my folks were like them. My folks were more, well, you know; but Aunt Louise and Uncle Guy were so friendly and outgoing and fun-loving and they didn’t have any children and I always thought, ‘I wish they’d ask if I could be their child.’ And they sat out in their porch swing together every nice summer evening, and it was a real pretty blue. Maybe Mediterranean blue. Do they have such a color as Mediterranean blue?”

“Linnie Mae,” Junior said. “The swing is already painted.”

“It is?”

“Or varnished, at least. It’s finished. This is how it’s going to be.”

“Oh, Junie, can’t we paint it blue? Please? I think how best to describe that blue is ‘sky blue,’ but by that I mean a real sky, a deep-blue summer sky. Not powder blue or aqua blue or pale blue, but more of a, how do you say—”

“Swedish,” Junior said through set teeth.

“What?”

“It was Swedish blue; you had it right the first time. I know because every goddamn house in Spruce Pine had Swedish-blue porch furniture. You’d think they’d passed a law or something. It was a common shade. It was common and low-class.”

Linnie was looking at him with her mouth open, and Merrick was tugging his hand to urge him toward the house. He wrung his fingers free and charged on up the walk, leaving the others to follow. If Linnie said one more word, he was going to fling back his head and roar like some kind of caged beast. But she didn’t.

The main thing he needed to do before they moved in was add a back porch. All the house had now was a little concrete stoop — one of the few battles with the Brills that Junior had lost, although he had pointed out to them repeatedly that their architect had provided no space for the jumble of normal life, the snow boots and catchers’ masks and hockey sticks and wet umbrellas.

Junior always made a spitting sound when someone mentioned architects.

He didn’t have men to spare these days because of the war. Two of them had enlisted right after Pearl Harbor, and one had gone to work at the Sparrows Point Shipyard, and a couple more had been drafted. So what he did, he took Dodd and Cary off the Adams job and set them to roughing out the porch, after which he finished the rest on his own. He went over there in the evenings, mostly, using the last of the natural light for the outside work and after that moving inside (the porch was enclosed at one end) to continue under the glare of the ceiling fixture his electrician had installed.

He liked working by himself. Most of his men, he suspected — or the younger ones, at least — found him stern and forbidding. He didn’t set them straight. They’d be talking woman troubles and trading tales of weekend binges, but the instant he showed himself they would shut up, and inwardly he would smile because little did they know. But it was best they never found out. He still did some hands-on work; he wasn’t too proud for that, but generally he did it off in some separate room — cutting dadoes, say, while the rest of them were framing an addition. They’d be gossiping and joking and teasing one another, but Junior (usually so talkative) worked in silence. In his head, a tune often played without his deciding which one—“You Are My Sunshine” for one task, say, and “Blueberry Hill” for another — and his work would fall into the tempo of the song. One long week, installing a complicated staircase, he found himself stuck with “White Cliffs of Dover” and he thought he would never finish, he was moving so slowly and mournfully. Although it did turn out to be a very well made staircase. Oh, there was nothing like the pleasure of a job done right — seeing how tidily a tenon fit into a mortise, or how the proper-size shim, properly shaved, properly tapped into place, could turn a joint nearly seamless.

A couple of days after he took Linnie to visit the house, he drove over there around four p.m. and parked in the rear. As he was stepping out of the truck, though, he saw something that stopped him dead in his tracks.

The porch swing sat next to the driveway, resting on a drop cloth.

And it was blue.

Oh, God, an awful blue, a boring, no-account, neither-here-nor-there Swedish blue. It was such a shock that he had a moment when he wondered if he was hallucinating, experiencing some taunting flash of vision from his youth. He gave a kind of moan. He slammed the truck door shut behind him and walked over to the swing. Blue, all right. He bent to set a finger on one armrest and it came away tacky, which was no surprise because up close, he could smell the fresh paint.

He looked around quickly, half sensing he was being watched. Someone was lurking in the shadows and watching him and laughing. But no, he was alone.

He had the key out of his pocket before he realized the back door was already open. “Linnie?” he called. He stepped inside and found Dodd McDowell at the kitchen sink, blotting a paintbrush on a splotched rag.

“What in the hell do you think you’re doing?” Junior asked him.

Dodd spun around.

“Did you paint that swing?” Junior asked him.

“Why, yes, Junior.”

“What for? Who told you you could do that?”

Dodd was a very pale, bald-headed man with whitish-blond eyebrows and lashes, but now he turned a deep red and his eyelids grew so pink that he looked teary. He said, “Linnie did.”

“Linnie!”

“Did you not know about it?”

“Where did you see Linnie?” Junior demanded.

“She called me on the phone last night. Asked if I would pick up a bucket of Swedish-blue high-gloss and paint the porch swing for her. I thought you knew about it.”

“You thought I’d hunt down solid cherry, and pay an arm and a leg for it, and put Eugene to work varnishing it in a shade to look right with the porch floor, and then have you slop blue paint on it.”

“Well, I didn’t know. I figured: women. You know?” And Dodd spread his hands, still holding the brush and the rag.

Junior forced himself to take a deep breath. “Right,” he said. “Women.” He chuckled and shook his head. “What’re you going to do with them? But listen,” he said, and he sobered. “Dodd. From now on, you take your orders from me. Understand?”

“I hear you, Junior. Sorry about that.”

Dodd still looked as if he were about to cry. Junior said, “Well, never mind. It’s fixable. Women!” he said again, and he gave another laugh and then turned and walked back out and shut the door behind him. He just needed a little time to get ahold of himself.

She was the bane of his existence. She was a millstone around his neck. That night back in ’31 when he went to collect her from the train station and found her waiting out front — her unevenly hemmed gray coat too skimpy for the Baltimore winter, her floppy, wide-brimmed felt hat so outdated that even Junior could tell — he’d had the incongruous thought that she was like mold on lumber. You think you’ve scrubbed it off but one day you see it’s crept back again.

He had considered not going to collect her. She had telephoned him at his boardinghouse, and when he heard that confounded “Junie?” (nobody else called him that) in her stringy high voice he’d known instantly who it was and his heart had sunk like a stone. He’d wanted to slam the earpiece onto the hook again. But he was caught. She had his landlady’s phone number. Lord only knew how she’d gotten it.

He said, “What.”

“It’s me! It’s Linnie Mae!”

“What do you want?”

“I’m here in Baltimore, can you believe it? I’m at the railroad station! Could you come pick me up?”

“What for?”

There was the tiniest pause. Then, “What for?” she asked. All the bounce had gone out of her voice. “Please, Junie, I’m scared,” she said. “There’s a whole lot of colored folks here.”

“Colored folks won’t hurt you,” he said. (They didn’t have any colored back home.) “Just pretend you don’t see them.”

“What am I going to do, Junior? How am I going to find you? You have to come and get me.”

No, he did not have to come and get her. She didn’t have the least little claim on him. There was nothing between them. Or there was only the worst experience of his life between them.

But he was already admitting to himself that he couldn’t just leave her there. She’d be as helpless as a baby chick.

Besides, a little sprig of curiosity had begun to poke up in his mind. Someone from home. Here in Baltimore!

The fact was, there weren’t a whole lot of people he knew to talk to in Baltimore.

So, “Well,” he said finally. “You be waiting, then.”

“Oh, hurry, Junie!”

“Wait out front. Go out the main door and watch for my car out front.”

“You have a car?”

“Sure,” he said. He tried to sound offhand about it.

He went back upstairs for his jacket. When he came down again, his landlady cracked her parlor door open and poked her head out. She had hair of a peculiar gold color with curls he couldn’t quite understand: each as round and flat as a penny, plastered to her temples. “Everything all right, Mr. Whitshank?” she asked, and Junior said, “Yes, ma’am,” and crossed the foyer in two strides and was gone.

Now, Junior’s belongings back then wouldn’t have filled a decent-size suitcase, but he did own a car of sorts: a 1921 Essex. He’d bought it off another carpenter for thirty-seven dollars when they all lost their jobs at the start of hard times. He’d justified the expenditure on the grounds that a car would help in his hunt for work, and that had turned out to be the case although he hadn’t bargained on its many crotchets and breakdowns. It crossed his mind, as he was coaxing the cold engine to life, that he could have told Linnie to take a streetcar instead. But he knew that would have been beyond her. Streetcars were foreign to her. She’d have bungled it somehow. He couldn’t even picture her making that train trip by herself, because she would have had to transfer in Washington, D.C., he knew, not to mention a whole lot of smaller stations before then.

He lived in the mill district, north of the station — a good distance north, in fact. To go south he cut east to St. Paul and then chugged between the rows of dimly lit houses, leaning forward from time to time to wipe the fog of his breath off the windshield. At length he passed the train station and turned right, onto the paving that crossed in front of its important-looking columns. He spotted Linnie immediately — the only person out there, her white, anxious face swiveling from side to side. But he didn’t stop for her. Without consciously deciding to, he gathered speed and drove on. He took another right onto Charles Street and headed for home, but halfway up the first block he started picturing how her forehead would have smoothed when she caught sight of him, how relieved she would have looked, how experienced and knowing he would have seemed arriving in his red Essex. He circled back around and passed the important columns again, and this time he veered into the pickup lane. Slowing to a stop, he watched as she snatched up her cardboard suitcase and hurried to open the passenger door.

“Did you drive past me once before?” she demanded as soon as she was seated.

Just like that, he lost his advantage.

“I was getting ready for bed,” he said, and his voice came out sounding whiny, somehow. “I’m half asleep.”

She said, “Oh, poor Junie, I’m sorry,” and she leaned across her suitcase to kiss his cheek. Her lips were warm, but she gave off the smell of frost. Also, underneath, another smell, one he associated with home: something like fried bacon. It weighed down his spirits.

But after he started driving, putting the Essex through its gears, he began to feel in control again. “I don’t know why you’re here,” he told her.

“You don’t know why I’m here?” she said.

“And I don’t know where I’m going to take you. I don’t have the money to put you up in a hotel. Unless you have money.”

If she did, she wasn’t letting on. “You’re taking me home with you,” she told him.

“No, I’m not. My landlady only rents to men.”

“You could slip me in, though.”

“What: slip you into my room?”

She nodded.

“Not on your life,” he said.

But he kept driving in the direction of the boardinghouse, because he didn’t know what else to do.

They reached an intersection, and he braked and turned to look at her. Five years, just about, hadn’t changed her in the least; she might still be thirteen. Her face still seemed drawn too tight, as if she didn’t have quite enough skin to go around, and her lips were still thin and colorless. It was as if she had frozen in time the day he left. He didn’t know why he had ever found her attractive. But clearly she couldn’t tell what he was thinking, because she smiled and ducked her chin and looked up at him sideways and said, “I wore those shoes you like so much.”

What shoes could those be? He didn’t remember any shoes. He glanced down at her feet and saw dark, high-heeled pumps with ankle straps, so blocky and oversized that her shins looked as slender as clover stems.

“How did you find out where I was?” he asked her.

She stopped smiling. She straightened and stood her big purse on the tip end of her knees.

“Well,” she said, and she gave a sharp nod. (He’d forgotten how she used to do that. It said, “Down to business.” It said, “Let me handle this.”) “Four days ago was my birthday,” she said. “I’m eighteen years old now.”

“Happy birthday,” he said dully.

“Eighteen, Junie! Legal age!”

“Legal age is twenty-one,” he told her.

“Well, for voting, maybe … and I already had my suitcase packed; I already had my money saved. I earned it picking galax every fall since you left. But I laid low till I was eighteen, so nobody could stop me. Then the day after my birthday, I had Martha Moffat drive me to the Parryville lumberyard and I asked the fellows there if they could say where you’d gone off to.”

“You asked the whole yard?” he said, and she nodded again.

He could just picture how that must have looked.

“And this one fellow, he told me you might could have headed north. He said he remembered you coming in one day, wondering if anyone knew where this carpenter was they called Trouble, on account of his name was Trimble. And they told you Trouble’d gone to Baltimore, so maybe that’s where you went, this fellow said, looking for work. So I got Martha to ride me to Mountain City and I bought a ticket to Baltimore.”

Junior was reminded of those movie cartoons where Bosko or someone steps off a cliff and doesn’t even realize he’s standing on empty space. Had Linnie not grasped the chanciness? He could have moved on years ago. He could be living in Chicago now, or Paris, France.

It seemed to him all at once a kind of failure that he was not; that here he still was, all this time afterward. And that she had somehow known he would be.

“Martha Moffat’s name is Shuford now,” Linnie was saying. “Did you know Martha got married? She married Tommy Shuford, but Mary Moffat’s still single and it’s like to kill her soul, you can tell. She acts mad at Martha all the time about every little thing. But then they never did get along as good as you’d expect.”

“As well,” he said.

“What?”

He gave up.

They were traveling through downtown, with the buildings set cheek to jowl and the streetlights glowing, but Linnie barely glanced out the window. He had thought she would be more impressed.

“When I got off the train in Baltimore,” she said, “I went straight to the public telephone and I looked for you in the book, and when I couldn’t find you I called everybody named Trimble. Or I would have, except Trouble’s first name turned out to be Dean and that came pretty soon in the alphabet. And he said you had looked him up, and he’d told you where you might could find work, but he didn’t know if they’d hired you or not and he couldn’t say where you were living, unless you were still at Mrs. Bess Davies’s where a lot of workingmen board at when they first come north.”

“You should get a job with Pinkerton’s,” Junior said. He wasn’t pleased to hear how easy he’d been to find.

“I worried you had moved by now, found a place of your own or something.”

He frowned. “There’s a depression on,” he said. “Or haven’t you heard?”

“It’s fine with me if you live in a boardinghouse,” she said, and she patted his arm. He jerked away, and for a while after that she was quiet.

When they reached Mrs. Davies’s street he parked some distance from the house, at the darker end of the block. He didn’t want anyone seeing them.

“Are you glad I’m here?” Linnie asked him.

He shut off the engine. He said, “Linnie—”

“But my goodness, we don’t have to go into everything all at once!” Linnie said. “Oh, Junior, I’ve missed you so! I haven’t once looked at a single other fellow since you left.”

“You were thirteen years old,” Junior said.

Meaning, “You’ve spent all the time since you were thirteen never having a boyfriend?”

But Linnie, misunderstanding, beamed at him and said, “I know.”

She picked up his right hand, which was still resting on the gearshift knob, and pressed it between both of hers. Hers were very warm, despite the weather, so that his must have struck her as cold. “Cold hands, warm heart,” she told him. Then she said, “And so here I am, about to spend the first full night with you I’ve ever had in my life.” She seemed to be taking it for granted that he had decided to slip her in after all.

“The first and only night,” he told her. “Then tomorrow you’re going to have to find yourself someplace else. It’s risky enough as it is; if Mrs. Davies caught wind of you, she’d put us both out on the street.”

“I wouldn’t mind that,” Linnie said. “Not if I was with you. It would be romantic.”

Junior withdrew his hand and heaved himself out of the car.

At the foot of the front steps he made her wait, and he opened the front door silently and checked for Mrs. Davies before he signaled Linnie to come on in. Every creak of the stairs as he and Linnie climbed made him pause a moment, filled with dread, but they made it. Arriving on the third floor — the servants’ floor, he’d always figured, on account of its tiny rooms with their low, slanted ceilings — he gave a jab of his chin toward a half-open door and whispered, “Bathroom,” because he didn’t want her popping in and out of his room all night. She wriggled her fingers at him and disappeared inside, while he continued on his way with her suitcase. He left his door cracked a couple of inches, the light threading out onto the hall floorboards, until she slipped inside and shut it behind her. She was carrying her hat in one hand and her hair was damp at the temples, he saw. It was shorter than when he’d first known her. It used to hang all the way down her back, but now it was even with her jaw. She was breathless and laughing slightly. “I didn’t have my soap or a facecloth or towel or anything,” she said. Even though she was whispering, it was a sharp, carrying whisper, and he scowled and said, “Ssh.” In her absence he’d stripped to his long johns. There was a small, squarish armchair in the corner with a mismatched ottoman in front of it — the only furniture besides a narrow cot and a little two-drawer bureau — and he settled into it as best he could and arranged his winter jacket over himself like a blanket. Linnie stood in the middle of the room, watching him with her mouth open. “Junie?” she said.

“I’m tired,” he said. “I have to work tomorrow.” And he turned his face away from her and closed his eyes.

He heard no movement at all, for a time. Then he heard the rustle of her clothing, the snap of two suitcase clasps, more rustling. The louder rustle of bedclothes. The lamp clicked off, and he relaxed his jaw and opened his eyes to stare into the dark.

“Junior?” she said.

He could tell she must be lying on her back. Her voice had an upward-floating quality.

“Junior, are you mad at me? What did I do wrong?”

He closed his eyes.

“What’d I do, Junior?”

But he made his breath very slow and even, and she didn’t ask again.

11

WHAT LINNIE HAD DONE WRONG:

Well, for starters, she’d not told him her age. The first time he saw her she was sitting on a picnic blanket with the Moffat twins, Mary and Martha, both of them seniors in high school, and he had just assumed that she was the same age they were. Stupid of him. He should have realized from her plain, unrouged face, and her hair hanging loose down her back, and the obvious pride she took in her new grown-upness — most especially in her breasts, which she surreptitiously touched with her fingertips from time to time in a testing sort of way. But they were such large breasts, straining against the bodice of her polka-dot dress, and she was wearing big white sandals with high heels. Was it any wonder he had imagined she was older? Nobody aged thirteen wore heels that Junior knew of.

He had come with Tillie Gouge, but only because she’d asked him. He didn’t feel any particular obligation to her. He picked up a molasses lace cookie from the picnic table laden with foods, and he walked over to Linnie Mae. Bending at the waist — which must have looked like bowing — he offered the cookie. “For you,” he said.

She lifted her eyes, which turned out to be the nearly colorless blue of Mason jars. “Oh!” she said, and she blushed and took it from him. The Moffat twins became all attention, sitting up very straight and watching for what came next, but Linnie just lowered her fine pale lashes and nibbled the edge of the cookie. Then, one by one, she licked each of her fingers in turn. Junior’s fingers were sticky too — he should have chosen a gingersnap — and he wiped them on the handkerchief he drew from his pocket, but meanwhile he was looking at her. When he’d finished, he offered her the handkerchief. She took it without meeting his eyes and blotted her fingers and handed it back, and then she bit off another half-moon of cookie.

“Do you belong to Whence Baptist?” he asked. (Because this picnic was a church picnic, given in honor of May Day.)

She nodded, chewing daintily, her eyes downcast.

“I’ve never been here before,” he said. “Want to show me around?”

She nodded again, and for a moment it seemed that that might be the end of it, but then she rose in a flustered, stumbling way — she’d been sitting on the hem of her dress and it snagged briefly on one of her heels — and walked off beside him, not so much as glancing at the Moffat twins. She was still eating her cookie. Where the churchyard met the graveyard she stopped and switched the cookie to her other hand and licked off her fingers again. Once again he offered his handkerchief, and once again she accepted it. He thought, with some amusement, that this could go on indefinitely, but when she’d finished blotting her fingers she placed her cookie on the handkerchief and then folded the handkerchief carefully, like someone wrapping a package, and gave it to him. He stuffed it in his left pocket and they resumed walking.

If he thought back on that scene now, it seemed to him that every detail of it, every gesture, had shouted “Thirteen!” But he could swear it hadn’t even crossed his mind at the time. He was no cradle robber.

Yet he had to admit that the moment when he’d taken notice of her was the moment she had touched her own breasts. At the time it had seemed seductive, but on second thought he supposed it could be read as merely childish. All she’d been doing, perhaps, was marveling at their brand-new existence.

She walked ahead of him through the cemetery, her skinny ankles wobbling in her high-heeled shoes, and she pointed out her daddy’s parents’ headstones — Jonas Inman and Loretta Carroll Inman. So she was one of the Inmans, a family known for their stuck-up ways. “What’s your first name?” he asked her.

“Linnie Mae,” she said, blushing again.

“Well, I am Junior Whitshank.”

“I know.”

He wondered how she knew, what she might have heard about him.

“Tell me, Linnie Mae,” he said, “can I see inside this church of yours?”

“If you want,” she said.

They turned and left the cemetery behind, crossed the packed-earth yard and climbed the front steps of Whence Cometh My Help. The interior was a single dim room with smoke-darkened walls and a potbellied stove, its few rows of wooden chairs facing a table topped with a doily. They came to a stop just inside the door; there was nothing more to see.

“Have you got religion?” he asked her.

She shrugged and said, “Not so much.”

This caused a little hitch in the flow, because it wasn’t what he’d expected. Evidently she was more complicated than he had guessed. He grinned. “A girl after my own heart,” he said.

She met his gaze directly, all at once. The paleness of her eyes startled him all over again.

“Well, I reckon I should go pay some heed to the gal I came here with,” he said, making a joke of it. “But maybe tomorrow evening I could take you to the picture show.”

“All right,” she said.

“Where exactly do you live?”

“I’ll just meet you at the drugstore,” she said.

“Oh,” he said.

He wondered if she was ashamed to show him to her family. Then he figured the hell with it, and he said, “Seven o’clock?”

“All right.”

They stepped back out into the sunlight, and without another glance she left him on the stoop and made a beeline for the Moffat twins. Who were watching, of course, as keen as two sparrows, their sharp little faces pointing in Junior and Linnie’s direction.

They had been seeing each other three weeks before her age came out. Not that she volunteered it; she just happened to mention one night that her older brother would be graduating tomorrow from eighth grade. “Your older brother?” he asked her.

She didn’t get it, for a moment. She was telling him how her younger brother was smart as a whip but her older brother was not, and he was begging to be allowed to drop out now and not go on to the high school in Mountain City the way their parents were expecting him to. “He’s never been one for the books,” she said. “He likes better to hunt and stuff.”

“How old is he?” Junior asked her.

“What? He’s fourteen.”

“Fourteen,” Junior said.

“Mm-hmm.”

“How old are you?” Junior asked.

She realized, then. She colored. She tried to carry it off, though. She said, “I mean he’s older than my other brother.”

“How old are you?” he said again.

She lifted her chin and said, “I’m thirteen.”

He felt he’d been kicked in the gut.

“Thirteen!” he said. “You’re just a … you’re not but half my age!”

“But I’m an old thirteen,” Linnie said.

“Good God in heaven, Linnie Mae!”

Because by now, they were doing it. They’d been doing it since their third date. They didn’t go to movies anymore, didn’t go for ice cream, certainly didn’t meet up with friends. (What friends would those have been, anyhow?) They just headed for the river in his brother-in-law’s truck and flung a quilt any old which way under a tree and rushed to tangle themselves up in each other. One night it poured and it hadn’t stopped them for a minute; they lay spread-eagled when they were finished and let the rain fill their open mouths. But this wasn’t something he had talked her into. It was Linnie who had made the first move, drawing back from him in the parked truck one night and shakily, urgently tearing open her button-front dress.

He could be arrested.

Her father grew burley tobacco, and he owned his land outright. Her mother came from Virginia; everyone knew Virginians thought they were better than other people. They would call the sheriff on him without the least hesitation. Oh, Linnie had been so foolish, so infuriatingly brainless, to meet him like that at the drugstore in the middle of her hometown wearing her dress-up dress and her high-heeled shoes! Junior lived over near Parry ville, six or eight miles away, so maybe no one who had seen them together in Yarrow knew him, but it couldn’t have escaped their notice that he was a grown man, most often in shabby clothes and old work boots with a day or two’s worth of beard, and it wouldn’t be that hard to find out his name and track him down. He asked Linnie, “Did you tell anybody about us?”

“No, Junior, I swear it.”

“Not the Moffat twins or anyone?”

“No one.”

“Because I could go to jail for this, Linnie.”

“I didn’t tell a soul.”

He made up his mind to stop seeing her, but he didn’t say so right then because she would get all teary and beg him to change his mind. There was something a little bit hanging-on about Linnie. She was always talking about this great romance of theirs, and telling him she loved him even though he never mentioned love himself, and asking him if he thought so-and-so was prettier than she was. It was because it was all so new to her, he guessed. God, he’d saddled himself with an infant. He couldn’t believe he had been so blind.

They folded the quilt and they got in the truck and Junior drove her back to town, not saying a word the whole ride although Linnie Mae chattered nonstop about her brother’s upcoming graduation party. When he drew up in front of the drugstore, he said he couldn’t meet her the following night because he’d promised to help his father with a carpentering job. She didn’t seem to find it odd that he would be carpentering at night. “Night after that, then?” she said.

“We’ll see.”

“But how will I know?”

“I’ll get word to you when I’m free,” he said.

“I’m going to miss you like crazy, Junior!”

And she flung herself on him and wrapped her arms around his neck, but he pulled her arms off him and said, “You’d better go on, now.”

Of course he didn’t get word to her. (He didn’t know how she had thought he would do that, seeing as he’d said they couldn’t tell anyone else.) He stayed strictly within his own territory — two acres of red clay outside Parryville bounded by a rickrack fence, in the three-room cabin he shared with his father and his last unmarried brother.

As it happened, the three of them did have work that week, replacing the roof on a shed for a lady down the road. They would set out early every morning in the wagon, with a tin bucket of buttermilk and a hunk of cornpone for their lunch, and they’d turn their mule loose in Mrs. Honeycutt’s pasture and go up on the roof to work all day in the blazing sun. By evening Junior would be so bushed that it was all he could do to force supper down. (His brother Jimmy had taken over the cooking after their mother died — just fried up whatever meat they’d last killed, using the half-inch of white grease that waited permanently in the skillet on the wood stove.) They’d be in bed by eight or eight thirty, workingmen’s hours. Three days in a row they did that, and Junior didn’t give more than a thought or two to Linnie Mae. Once Jimmy asked if he wanted to go into town after supper and see if they could find any girls, and Junior said, “Nah,” but it wasn’t on account of Linnie. It was just that he was too beat.

Then they finished with the roof, and they didn’t have anything else lined up. Junior spent the next day at home, but he was bored out of his mind and his father was acting ornery, so he figured maybe the next morning he would walk on down to the lumberyard and look for work. They were used to having him come and go there; they could generally use a hand.

He was sitting out on the stoop with the dogs, smoking a cigarette — the twilight still at that stage where it’s transparent, the fireflies just beginning to turn on and off in the yard — when a car he didn’t know pulled in, a beat-up Chevrolet driven by a fellow in a seed-store cap. And a girl jumped out the front passenger door and walked over to him, saying, “Hey, Junior.” One of the Moffat twins. The dogs raised their heads but then settled their chins on their paws again. “Hey back,” Junior said, not using a name because he didn’t know which one she was. She handed him a piece of white paper and he unfolded it, but it was hard to read in the dusk. “What’s this?” he asked.

“It’s from Linnie Mae.”

He held it up to the faint lantern-light that was coming through the screen door. “Junior, I need to talk to you,” he read. “Let the Moffats give you a ride to my house.”

He got a lump of ice in his chest. When a girl said she needed to talk … oh, Lord. Part of him was already trying to figure out where to run, how to get away before she delivered the news that would trap him for life. But the Moffat twin said, “You coming?”

“What: now?”

“Now,” she said. “We’ll ride you over.”

He stood up and stepped on his cigarette. “Well,” he said. “All right.”

He followed her to the car. It was a closed car with four doors, and she got into the front and left him to settle in the rear beside the other twin, who said, “Hey, Junior.”

“Hey,” he said.

“You know our brother Freddy.”

“Hey, Freddy,” he said. He didn’t recall ever meeting him. Freddy just grunted, and then shifted gears and pulled out of the yard and set off down Seven Mile Road.

Junior knew he should make conversation, but all he could think about was what Linnie was going to tell him and what he was going to do about it. What could he do about it? He wasn’t such a bastard as to pretend it hadn’t been him. Although it did cross his mind.

“Linnie’s folks are throwing a party for Clifford tonight,” the first twin said.

“Who’s Clifford?”

“Clifford her brother. He’s finished eighth grade.”

“Oh.”

It seemed to him kind of funny to make such a fuss about eighth grade. When he had finished eighth grade, the big to-do was over why on earth he was set on going on to high school. His father had had it in mind to put him to work, while Junior was thinking that there were still some things he hadn’t learned yet.

Linnie surely didn’t expect him to come to the party, did she? Even she couldn’t be that dumb.

But the twin said, “She’ll be able to slip out of the house easy, being as there’s family around. They’ll never notice she’s gone.”

“Oh,” he said, relieved.

That seemed to use up all their conversational topics.

They cut over on Sawyer Road instead of driving on into Yarrow, so he supposed the Inmans’ farm must lie to the north of town. The smell of fresh manure started drifting through his open window. Sawyer Road was just gravel, and every time the Chevrolet hit a bump the headlamps flickered and threatened to die. It made him nervous. Shoot, everything made him nervous.

He wondered if this was a setup, if they’d have the sheriff ready and waiting at the house. Junior wasn’t liked by the sheriff. As a boy he’d caused a near-accident when he and some friends of his were riding on the back of a wagon and they signaled to the car behind that it was okay to pass. And there’d been a few other situations, over the years.

Freddy turned left where Sawyer Road butt-ended into Pee Creek Road, which was paved and gave a much smoother ride. Some distance after that he turned right, onto a dirt driveway. The house looked big to Junior. It was painted white or light gray and all the windows were lit. A few cars and trucks were parked at different angles on the grass out front. Freddy drove around to the rear, though, where Junior could make out the silhouettes of several dark sheds and barns. “Here we are,” the first twin said.

A shadow moved away from the nearest barn and turned into Linnie, wearing something pale. As she approached the car, Junior asked the Moffats, “Are you-all going to wait for me, or what?”

Before they could answer, Linnie stepped up to his window and whispered, “Junior?”

“Hey,” he said.

She leaned in close, although she couldn’t be thinking he would do anything soft in front of these people, could she? He fended her off by opening his door, nudging her backward. “You-all wait here,” he told the Moffats. “I’m going to need a ride home.”

Linnie said, “Thanks, Freddy. Hey, Martha; hey, Mary.”

“Hey, Linnie,” the twins said in chorus.

Junior stepped out of the car and shut the door behind him, and immediately Freddy shifted into reverse and started backing up. “Where’re they going?” Junior asked Linnie.

“Oh, off somewheres, I guess.”

“How am I getting home?”

“They’ll be back! Come on.”

She was leading him toward the barn she’d come out of, gripping him by the hand. He resisted. “I’m not going to be but a minute,” he said. “They should have stayed.”

“Come on, Junior. Someone will see you!”

He gave up and followed her into the barn, which was pitch-dark once she had shut the door behind them. “Let’s go up in the loft,” she whispered.

But that didn’t feel right. You could be cornered, in a loft. “We can talk down here,” he said. “I can’t stay long. I need to get home. Are you sure the Moffats know to come for me? Why’d you tell them about us? You swore you wouldn’t tell a soul.”

“I didn’t! Just the twins. They think it’s romantic. They’re real happy for us.”

“Good God, Linnie.”

“Let’s go up in the loft, I mean it. It’s more comfortable there; it’s got hay.”

He ignored her and headed for the rear of the barn, across creaky, straw-littered floorboards. She said, “I don’t know why you’re being so contrary.” She reached out in the dark, feeling for something and then yanking, and an overhead bulb lit up and pained his eyes. These people had electricity even in their outbuildings. He saw that he was standing next to a rusted plow. A thin slant of trampled-down hay was piled in the corner beyond. Linnie’s face looked all crinkly in the sudden brightness, and his did too, he supposed. She was wearing a dress that seemed a mite low in the neck to him. He was surprised her mother had allowed it; Linnie always made out that her mother was so strict. He could see the two mounds of her breasts swelling above the fabric, but it didn’t affect him. He pulled his Camels from his shirt pocket. “What’d you want to talk about?” he asked.

“You can’t smoke in here!”

He put the Camels away.

“Go ahead and say it,” he said.

“Say what?”

“Say what you brought me here to tell me.”

She drew herself up straight. “Junior,” she said, “I know why you’ve stopped meeting me. You’re thinking I’m too young for you.”

“What? Wait.”

“But age is just a date on a calendar. You aren’t being fair. You’re going by something I can’t help. And you can see that I’m a woman. Haven’t I acted like a woman? Don’t I feel like a woman?”

She took one of his hands and laid it above the U of her neckline, where the swelling began. He said, “That’s what you wanted to tell me?”

“I want to tell you that you’re being narrow-minded.”

“Shoot, Linnie,” he said. “You’re not in trouble?”

“In trouble! No!”

He didn’t know why she sounded so shocked; they hadn’t always been careful. But he felt such a weight lifting off him that he laughed aloud, and then he bent to set his lips on hers and his hand slid lower on her neckline, down inside it, where it didn’t seem she was wearing a brassiere although she surely could have used one. He squeezed, and she drew a sharp breath, and he pressed her back toward the corner of the barn and laid her down on the hay, not once taking his lips away. He kicked his boots off, somehow. He got free of his overalls and his BVDs all in one move. Linnie was struggling out of her drawers, and just as he reached to help her he heard … not words but a sort of bellow, like the sound a bull makes, and then, “Great God Almighty!”

He rolled over and scrambled to his feet. A skinny little stick of a man was lunging toward him with both hands outstretched, but Junior stepped aside. The man landed against the plow and hastily righted himself. “Clifford!” he roared. “Brandon!”

Junior had the confused impression that the man was trying out different names on him, but then from the direction of the house he heard another voice call, “Daddy?”

“Get out here! Bring a gun!”

“Daddy, wait, you don’t understand,” Linnie said.

But he was too busy trying to clamp his hands around Junior’s throat. Junior thought he should be given a moment to get his overalls back on; it put him at a disadvantage. He pried Mr. Inman’s fingers loose without much difficulty, but when he spun toward where his clothes lay the man grabbed hold of him again. Then, “Freeze!” somebody shouted, and he turned his head to find two boys standing in the doorway training Winchesters on him.

He froze.

“Hand me that,” Mr. Inman ordered, and the younger boy stepped forward and passed him his rifle.

Mr. Inman backed up just far enough to put the length of the rifle between himself and Junior, and then he cocked the lever and told Junior, “Turn around.”

Junior turned so he was facing the two boys, who seemed more interested than angry. They had their eyes fixed on his crotch. Junior felt the cold, perfect circle of the rifle muzzle in the dead center of the back of his neck. It prodded him. “Forward,” Mr. Inman said.

“Well, if I could just—”

“Forward!”

“Sir, could I just get my clothes?”

“No, you cannot get your clothes. Could he get his clothes! Just go. Get out of my barn and get off of my land and get out of this state, you hear? Because if you’re not two states over by morning I will set the law on you, I swear to God. I’ve half a mind to do it anyhow, except I don’t want the shame on my family.”

“But, Daddy, he’s half nekkid,” Linnie said.

“You shut up,” Mr. Inman told her.

He jabbed the rifle harder into the back of Junior’s neck and Junior lurched forward, sending a last desperate glance toward the crumple of his clothes in the hay. The toe of one boot was poking out from underneath them.

It was dark in the yard, but the bulb above the back door of the house lit him clearly, he could tell, because the people crowding out on the stoop all gasped and murmured — women and a couple of men and a whole bunch of children, all ages, their eyes as round as moons, the little boys nudging one another.

It was a blessing to leave the circle of light and step into the deep, velvety blackness just beyond. With one last jab of the rifle muzzle, Mr. Inman came to a halt and let Junior stumble on by himself.

He hadn’t walked barefoot since he was in grade school. Every stob and pebble made him wince.

Next to the Inmans’ yard it was woods, the scrubby kind thick with briers to snatch at his bare skin, but that was better than the open road, where headlights could pick him out at any moment. He found himself a middling-size tree that he could stand behind, close enough that he could still see pieces of the Inmans’ lighted windows through the undergrowth. He was hoping for Linnie Mae to come out eventually with his clothes.

Gnats whined in his ears and tree frogs piped. He shifted from foot to foot and swatted away something feathery, a moth. His heartbeat got back to normal.

Linnie didn’t come. He supposed they had locked her up.

After some time he took his shirt off and tied the sleeves around his waist with the body of the shirt hanging down in front like an apron. Then he stepped out from behind the tree and made his way to the road. The ground alongside it was stony, so he walked on the asphalt, which was smooth and still faintly warm from a day’s worth of sun. With every step, he listened for the sound of a car. If it was the Moffats’ car, he would need to flag it down. He could already picture how the twins would snicker at the sight of him.

One time he heard a faint hum up ahead and he saw a kind of radiance on the horizon. He ducked back into the bushes just in case and kept a watch, but the road stayed empty and the radiance faded. Whoever it was must have cut off someplace. He returned to the pavement.

If the Moffats did come, would he recognize their car in time? Would he mistake another car for theirs and get caught by strangers without his pants on?

This was the kind of fix that the men he worked with told jokes about, but when he tried to imagine talking about it ever, to anybody, he couldn’t. To begin with, the girl was thirteen. Right there that put a different light on things.

Sawyer Road took so long to show up, he started worrying he had passed it. He could have sworn it was closer. He crossed to the other side of the pavement so he’d be sure not to miss it, although the other side was low-growth fields and he would be easier to spot there. He heard a fluttering overhead and then the hoot of an owl, which for some reason struck him as comforting.

Much, much later than he had expected, he came across the narrow pale band of Sawyer Road and he turned onto it. The gravel was vicious, but he had stopped bothering to mince as he walked. He trudged heavily, obstinately, taking a peculiar pleasure in the thought that the soles of his feet must be cut to ribbons.

He hoped Linnie had found a way out of the house by now and was standing in the yard calling “Junior? Junior?” and wringing her hands. Good luck to her, because she was never going to lay eyes on him again as long as she lived. If only she hadn’t noticed that he’d been caught without his overalls on, he might have been able to forgive her, but “Daddy, he’s half nekkid!” she’d said, and now whatever little feeling he might have had for her was dead and gone forever.

He didn’t know what time it was when he finally hit Seven Mile Road. He walked in the very center, where the asphalt was smoothest, but his feet were so shredded by then that even that was torture.

When he reached home the sky was lightening, or maybe he’d just turned into some kind of night-visioned animal. He nudged a sleeping dog aside with his foot, opened the screen door and stepped into the close, musty dark and the sound of snoring. In the bedroom, he shucked off the shirt tied around his waist and felt his way to the chifforobe and dug out a pair of BVDs. Stepping into them was the sweetest feeling in the world. He sank onto the rumpled sheets next to Jimmy and closed his eyes.

But not to sleep. Oh, no. His whole walk home he had been longing for sleep, but now he was thoroughly, electrically awake, watching vivid pictures flash past. The party guests gawking on the stoop. His skinny white legs with no pants on. Linnie’s witless face and her dropped jaw.

He’s half nekkid!

He hated her.

During his first months in Baltimore, those pictures could make him wince and snap his head violently to one side, trying to shake them out of his brain. Gradually, though, they grew fainter. He had other things to think about. Just making his way in the world, for instance. Figuring out how it all worked. Adjusting to the unsettling look of the horizon in these parts — the jumble of low, close buildings wherever he turned, the lack of those broad-shouldered purple mountains rising in the distance to give him a sense of protection.

At some point, it occurred to him that it was highly unlikely Mr. Inman would have set the law on him. As the man had said himself, he didn’t want to shame his family. All Junior would have needed to do was keep out of the way for a while, and maybe partake in a fistfight or two if he chanced to be in the wrong place. But this realization did not cause him to pack up and go home. For one thing, he found it surprisingly easy to put his family behind him. His mother was the one he had cared about, and she had died when he was twelve. His father had turned mean after that, and Junior had never been close to his brothers or his sister, who were all considerably older. (Had he, in fact, just been looking for any excuse to get away from them all?) But what was even more important: by then he had discovered work. Prideful work, the kind that makes you eager to get out of bed every morning.

When he’d asked after Trouble’s whereabouts in the lumberyard that day, it had been in the back of his mind that maybe he’d get a job with him. Trouble had always struck him as interesting. He took his wood so seriously. In fact, his nickname was no accident: the mere appearance of his truck in the lumberyard would bring good-natured groans from the men, because they knew he would want to study each and every board as if he were looking to marry it. It shouldn’t have any knotholes, any chewed-off ends or unsightly grain. (That was the word he used: “unsightly.”) He built fine furniture, was why. He used to work at a factory in High Point but he quit in disgust and set up in Parryville, where his wife’s people were from. And he’d more than once told the men in the lumberyard that he’d a good mind to strike out from Parryville, too, and go up north where there was more of a market for his kind of product.

So when Junior walked over to his brother-in-law’s house the morning he left home (wearing his lace-up church shoes that made his battered feet hurt even worse), he asked if they could stop by the lumberyard on their way out of town. All he got at the lumberyard was a mention of Baltimore, but that would have to suffice. He climbed back into the truck and they drove to the gas station on Highway 80. “Tell the family I’ll send them a postcard once I know where I’m at,” he said when he got out. Raymond lifted one hand from the steering wheel and then pulled back onto the road, and Junior went into the station to look for somebody heading north.

He had a paper sack with two sets of clothes inside and a razor and a comb, and twenty-eight dollars in his pocket.

But he should have realized Trouble wouldn’t want to hire him. Trouble liked to work alone. (And probably lacked the money for a helper, anyhow.) After Junior had spent two days tracking his shop down, the man didn’t offer him so much as a drink of water, although he was civil enough. “Work? You mean lumberyard work?” he asked, all the while keeping his eyes on the drawer-front he was beveling.

Junior said, “I had in mind something that takes some skill. I’m good at making things. I’d like to make something that I could be proud of afterwards.”

Trouble did pause in his beveling, then. He looked up at Junior and said, “Well, there’s a house builder in these parts who seems to me real particular. Clyde Ward, his name is; I sometimes make cabinets for him. I might could tell you where you would find him.” He also suggested Mrs. Davies’s boardinghouse as a dwelling place, which Junior was glad to hear about because he’d been staying at a sailors’ hotel down near the harbor where they expected him to sing hymns every evening.

After that, he never saw Trouble again. But he rented a room at Mrs. Davies’s, in her three-story house in Hampden that must once have belonged to a mill owner or at least a manager, and he went to work for Clyde Ward, the most exacting builder he had ever come across. It was from Mr. Ward that he learned the great pleasure of doing things right.

He did send his family a postcard, eventually, but they never wrote him back and he didn’t send another. That was okay; he didn’t even think about them. He didn’t think about Linnie Mae, either. She was a tiny, dim person buried in the back of his mind alongside that other person, his past self — that completely unrelated self who went out carousing every weekend and spent his money on cigarettes and fast girls and bootleg whiskey. The new Junior had a plan. He was going to be his own boss someday. His life was a straight, shining road now with a clear destination, and he supposed he ought to thank Linnie for setting his feet upon it.

12

LINNIE’S FIRST ACT in Baltimore was to get them both evicted.

During the night, Junior had awakened twice — the first time with his heart racing because he sensed the presence of somebody else in the room, but then he found himself in the armchair and thought, “Oh, it’s only Linnie,” which came as a relief, under the circumstances; and the second time when he was jolted upright from what he believed was a dreamless sleep by the sudden realization that when Linnie had said she was of legal age now, she had probably meant legal marrying age. “She’s like a … like one of those monkeys,” he thought, “twining her arms tight around the organ grinder’s neck.” That time, he hadn’t been able to go back to sleep for hours.

Even so, he rose early, both out of natural inclination and because there was always a rush for the bathroom in the mornings. He dressed and went to shave, and then he came back to the room and tapped the sharp peak of Linnie’s shoulder. “Get up,” he said.

She rolled over and looked at him. He had the impression that she had been awake for some time; her eyes were wide and clear. “You can’t stay here while I’m at work,” he told her. “You have to go out. There’s a girl comes upstairs to clean in the mornings.”

“Oh,” she said. “Okay.” And she sat up and drew back the covers and swung her feet to the floor. She was wearing a nightgown that would have worked better in the summer, a thin white cotton petticoat-thing that barely covered her knees. It was the first time he had seen her out of her winter wraps, and he realized she had changed more than he had first thought. She might still be too thin, but she had lost her coltish gawkiness. Her calves and her upper arms had more of a curve to them.

When she stood up he turned away from her so as not to see her dressing, and he went over to the bureau. A tin oatmeal canister sat on top; he opened it and took out the loaf of store bread that he kept shut away from the mice. Then he raised the window sash and reached for the milk. “Breakfast,” he told Linnie.

“That’s your breakfast? Doesn’t your landlady give you breakfast?”

“Not me. Some of the others, they can afford to get their three squares here but I can’t.”

He shut the window and uncapped the milk bottle and took a swig. (It was something of a pleasure to show off how handily he dealt with adversity.) Then he held the bottle toward Linnie, still carefully not looking at her, and he felt her lift it out of his grasp. “But what about in hot weather?” she asked. “How’ll we keep the milk from souring when it’s hot?”

We? He felt that organ-grinder panic again, but he answered levelly. “In hot weather I switch to buttermilk,” he said. “Can’t much go wrong with that.”

The milk bottle jogged his elbow and he took it and passed her a slice of bread in exchange, keeping his face set stubbornly toward the window where the smoke stood up from the chimneys outside as if it were too cold to drift. Tonight he should bring the milk in; he didn’t want it freezing solid.

Linnie Mae was unclasping her suitcase now, by the sound of it. Junior folded his own slice of bread into quarters to get it over with quicker, and he took a large bite and chewed doggedly, listening to the rustles behind him. Then he heard the click of the door lock and he wheeled around. She was grasping the doorknob to turn it; he lunged past her and threw himself in front of her. It startled her, he could tell. She drew back as if she thought he might hit her, which he wouldn’t have, but still, it was just as well she knew he meant business.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked her.

“I need to use the bathroom.”

“You can’t. Someone’ll see you.”

“But I need to pee, Junior. Bad.”

“The café down the street has a bathroom,” he said. “Get your coat on; we’re leaving. I’ll show you where the café is.” She was wearing what looked like a summer dress, belted and short-sleeved. Didn’t they have winter back home anymore, or what? And on her feet were those same high-heeled shoes. “Put on warmer shoes, too,” he said.

“I didn’t bring any warmer shoes.”

How on earth did her mind work? “Come on the way you are, then,” he said. “It’s too risky to use the bathroom here; it’s six men deep in the mornings.”

She took her coat from the closet and put it on so painstakingly that it seemed she was bound and determined to irk him, and then she lifted her purse down from the closet shelf. Meanwhile, Junior set the milk back outside, and then he hunched himself into his jacket and went over to the bed. The suitcase lay there wide open, brazen as you please, and he closed it and bent to slide it underneath the bed, way back toward the wall. After one last look around the room, he said, “Okay. Let’s go.”

He peeked out the door first, making sure the hall was empty. He motioned her out ahead of him and locked the door behind them, and they walked the length of the hall and down the two flights of stairs without encountering anyone. They crossed the foyer, which was the most dangerous part, but the parlor door stayed shut. Junior heard the clink of china and he smelled coffee. He wasn’t one for coffee himself but the smell always made him long for some — or just for people eating breakfast together, a slant of morning sunlight across the tablecloth.

Out on the sidewalk, the cold air at first seemed a blessing. (The third floor always collected the heat.) Junior came to a stop and pointed toward the intersection with Dutch Street, where the sign for the café was plainly visible. “But what if it’s not open yet?” Linnie asked him. She was no longer bothering to keep her voice down, although they were standing right under Mrs. Davies’s parlor window.

“It’ll be open. This is a workingmen’s neighborhood.”

“And after that, what? Where will I go?”

“That’s your business,” he said.

“Can’t I come with you to where you work? I could help out, maybe. I know how to hammer and saw some.”

“That is a bad idea,” he said.

“Or just wait in your car, then! I can’t stay out in the cold all day.”

She was standing too close to him, lifting her face to him. He could actually feel her warm foggy breath and smell the sleepy smell of it. Her hair had a frowsy, uncombed look and her nose was pink.

“You should have thought of that before you came,” he said. “Go sit in the train station or something. Ride the streetcar up and down. I’ll meet you out front of the café a little after five.”

“Five!”

“Then we’ll talk about your plans.”

He could tell from the way her forehead cleared that she thought he meant their plans. He didn’t bother setting her straight.

The work he was doing that week was for an elderly couple in Homeland, flooring an unfinished attic and changing a louvered attic vent into a window. He had found it the way he found most work these days: driving out to one of the better-off neighborhoods and knocking on people’s doors. In his glove box he kept the letter of reference Mr. Ward had written for him when Ward Builders had had to shut down, but people generally took Junior’s word for it that he knew what he was doing. He made a point of wearing clean clothes and shaving daily and speaking respectfully and trying his best to watch his grammar. Then once he had a job lined up, he would drive off for whatever materials he needed; he had a credit arrangement with a builders’ supply in Locust Point. He would return with the Essex loaded down like an ant beneath an oversized breadcrumb. Best decision he’d ever made was buying that Essex. Lots of workmen had to transport their materials on the streetcar — pay the extra fare for their lengths of pipe or lumber and enlist the conductor’s help in roping them to the outside of the car — but not Junior.

This particular job wasn’t very interesting, but it was a good deal more useful than the hand-carved mantels and built-in knickknack shelves of his days with Mr. Ward. The couple’s grown daughter was moving back home with her four children and her husband, who had lost his job, and the attic was where the children would sleep. Besides, Junior knew that sooner or later, things were bound to get better. Folks in these parts would be wanting their mantels and their knickknack shelves once again, and then his would be the name that came to mind.

People in Homeland could often be clannish, but this couple acted friendlier and some days the wife called up from the bottom of the attic staircase to say that she was leaving a little something for his lunch. Today she left an egg sandwich cut on the diagonal, and he ate one half but he wrapped the other half in his handkerchief to take back to Linnie. Even though he was desperate to get shed of her, it wasn’t all bad knowing that somebody somewhere was waiting for him.

Junior hadn’t had much luck with girls in Baltimore, to tell the truth. Girls up north were just harder. Harder to figure out and harder-natured, both.

So he knocked off from work a tiny bit early, more like four thirty than five.

He found a parking spot just half a block past Mrs. Davies’s — one advantage of getting home at this hour. As he was maneuvering into it he chanced to look back toward the boardinghouse, and what should he see but that floppy old-fashioned felt hat and Linnie Mae beneath it, wrapped in a huge denim jacket, sitting on Mrs. Davies’s front steps as bold as brass. He didn’t know which was more upsetting: that she’d show herself in public like that or that she’d managed to get hold of her hat, which she had not been wearing that morning, and the jacket that hung in the back of his closet waiting for warmer weather. How had she done that? Had she gone back to the room? Had she picked his lock, or what?

He slammed the car door getting out, and she looked his way and her face lit up. “It’s you!” she called.

“What in hell, Linnie?”

She stood up, clutching the jacket tighter around her. She was wearing her coat underneath. “Now, Junie, don’t get mad,” she said as soon as he was closer.

“You were supposed to wait at the corner.”

“I tried to wait at the corner, but there isn’t any place to sit.”

Junior took hold of her elbow, not gently, and steered her away from the steps to stand in front of the house next door. “How come you’re wearing my jacket?” he asked her.

“Well,” she said, “it’s like this. First I went into the café to use the bathroom, but they said I couldn’t on account of I hadn’t bought anything. So I told them I’d be buying a hot chocolate after, and then I sat with that chocolate and sat with it; I’d take a little sip only every thirty minutes or so. But they were real inhospitable, Junior. After a time, they said they needed my stool. So I left, and I walked a long ways, and this one place I found a slat bench and I sat a while, and this old lady and me got to talking and she told me there was a breadline three streets over; I should come with her because she was going; you had to get in line early or they would run out of food. It was not but ten or ten thirty but she said we should go right then to hold our places. I said, ‘Breadline!’ I said, ‘Charity?’ But I went with her because I figured, well, anyhow it would be someplace warm to sit. So we stood in that line it seems like forever; all these people stood with us, and some of them were children, Junior, and I lost all feeling in my feet; they were like two blocks of ice. And then when time came for the place to open, you know what? They wouldn’t let us inside. They just came out on the stoop and handed each of us a sandwich wrapped in wax paper, two slices of bread with a hunk of cheese in between. I asked the old lady with me, I said, ‘Don’t they let us sit down anywhere?’ ‘Sit down!’ she said. ‘We’re lucky enough to have something to put in our stomachs. Beggars can’t be choosers,’ she said. And I thought, ‘Well, she’s right. We’re beggars.’ I thought, ‘I have just stood in a breadline to beg my lunch from strangers,’ and I started crying. I left the old lady and walked I-don’t-know-where-all eating my sandwich and crying, and I didn’t have a notion where I was anymore or where the café was that I was going to meet up with you in front of, and that sandwich was dry as sawdust, let me tell you, and I wanted a drink of water and my feet felt like knives. And then I looked up and what did I see? Mrs. Davies’s boardinghouse. It looked like home, after all I’d been through. And I thought, ‘Well, he told me the girl came to clean in the mornings. And it’s not morning anymore, so—’ ”

Junior groaned.

“—so I walked right in, and it was so warm and toasty in the foyer! I walked up the stairs with no one to see me and I went to your room and tried to open the door but it was locked.”

“You knew that,” Junior said. “You saw me lock it.”

“Did I? Well, I don’t know; I must have been distracted. You hurried me out of there so fast …‘Well,’ I thought, ‘okay, I’ll just sit in the hall and wait. At least it’s warm,’ I thought, and I sat right down on the floor in front of your bedroom door.”

He groaned again.

“And next thing I knew, it was ‘Awk!’ I think I must have fallen asleep. ‘Awk!’ I heard, and there was this colored girl standing over me, eyes as big as moons. ‘Miz Davies! Come quick! A burg-ular!’ she screeches. When she could clearly see I was dressed nicely. And Mrs. Davies heard and came running, came clattering up the stairs out of breath and ‘Explain yourself!’ she says. I was thinking since she was a woman, maybe she’d have a kind heart. I threw myself on her mercy. ‘Mrs. Davies,’ I said, ‘I’ll be straight with you: I’m up from down home to see Junior because the two of us are in love. And it’s so cold outside, you wouldn’t believe, so blessed cold and all I’ve had all day is a little hot chocolate and a breadline sandwich and one sip of milk from Junior’s windowsill and a slice of his store-bought bread—’ ”

“Lord God, Linnie,” Junior said in disgust.

“Well, what could I say? I figured since she was a woman … wouldn’t you think? I thought she might say, ‘Oh, you poor little thing. You must be chilled to the bone.’ But she was ugly to me, Junior. I should have guessed it, from that dyed hair. She said, ‘Out!’ She said, ‘You and him both, out! Here I was thinking Junior Whitshank was a decent hardworking man!’ she says. ‘Why, I could have got way higher rent from someone who’d take his meals here, but I let him stay on out of Christian spirit and this is the thanks I get? Out,’ she says. ‘I’m not running a brothel,’ and she flips up this ring of keys hanging on her belt and unlocks your door and says, ‘Pack all your things, yours and his both, and get out.’ ”

Junior gripped his forehead with one hand.

“Then she stood right there like I was some sort of criminal, Junior, watching every move while I packed. Colored girl standing next to her with eyes still big as moons. What did they think I would steal? What would I want to steal? I couldn’t find any suitcase for you and so I asked real polite, I said, ‘Mrs. Davies,’ I said, ‘do you think I might borrow a cardboard box if I promised to bring it back later?’ But she said, ‘Ha! As if I’d trust you!’ Like a little old cardboard box was something precious. I had to pack your things in a tied-up pair of your overalls, for lack of anything better.”

“You packed all I owned?” Junior asked.

“All in this big lumpy tied-up hobo bundle. And then I had to—”

“You packed my Prince Albert tin?”

“I packed every little thing, I tell you.”

“But did you pack my Prince Albert tin, Linnie.”

“Yes, I packed your Prince Albert tin. Why’re you making such a fuss about it? I thought you smoked Camels.”

“I don’t smoke anything nowadays,” he said bitterly. “It costs too much.”

“Then why—?”

“Let me get this clear,” he told her. “I don’t have a place to live anymore, is that what you’re saying?”

“No, and me neither. Can you believe it? Would you ever think that she could act so ugly? And then I had to carry all those things down the street — my suitcase and that great knobby bundle and your canister with the bread inside and — oh! Junior! Your milk bottle! I forgot your milk bottle! I’m so sorry!”

“That’s what you’re sorry about?”

“I’ll buy us another. Milk was ten cents at this store I went past. I’ve got ten cents, easy.”

“You are telling me I’m sleeping on the street tonight,” Junior said.

“No, wait; I’m getting to that. There I was, toting all our worldly goods, walking down the street and crying, and I was looking for a ROOM TO LET sign but I didn’t see nary a one so finally I just knocked on some lady’s door and said, ‘Please, my husband and I have lost our home and we’ve got no place to stay.’ ”

“Well, that would never work,” Junior said. (He didn’t bother dealing just now with the “husband” part.) “Half the country could say that.”

“You’re right,” Linnie said cheerfully. “It didn’t work a bit, not with her nor with the next lady either nor the lady after that, though all of them were real nice about it. ‘Sorry, honey,’ they said, and one lady offered me a square of gingerbread but I was still full from the charity sandwich. By then I was way down Dutch Street. I’d turned left at the café and of course I didn’t bother asking there, not after how they’d treated me. But the next lady said that she would take us in.”

“What?”

“And it’s a nicer room, too. It’s got a bigger bed, so you won’t have to sleep on a chair. No bureau, but there’s a nightstand with drawers, and a closet. The lady let me have it because her husband’s been laid off work and she’s been thinking for a while now, she said, that maybe their little boy should move in with his sister so they could rent his room out for five dollars a week.”

“Five dollars!” Junior said. “Why so steep?”

“Is that steep?”

“At Mrs. Davies’s I pay four.”

“You do?”

“Is this with meals?” Junior asked.

“Well, no.”

Junior looked longingly toward Mrs. Davies’s house. For one half-second, he contemplated climbing her steps and ringing the doorbell. Maybe he could reason with her. She’d always seemed to like him. She had asked him to call her Bess, even, but that would have felt impertinent; she had to be in her forties. And just this past Christmas Eve she had invited him down to her parlor for a glass of something special (as she called it) that she had bought at the paint store, but that had been sort of uncomfortable because even though Junior missed having people to talk to, somehow with Mrs. Davies he hadn’t been able to think of a single thing to say.

Maybe he could make like he had come to return his key, and then he would happen to mention that he barely knew Linnie Mae (which was true, in fact), that she was nothing to him, merely a girl from home in need of a place to stay, and he had taken pity on her.

But right while he had his eyes on the house, a little gap in the parlor curtain closed with an angry snap, and he knew there was no use trying.

He set off toward the Essex, and Linnie walked beside him with a bounce to each step, almost as if she were skipping. “You’re going to like Cora Lee,” she said. “She comes from West Virginia.”

“Oh, she’s ‘Cora Lee’ already, is she.”

“She thinks we’re just real cute and adventurous to be up here on our own so far away from our families.”

“Linnie Mae,” he said, stopping short on the sidewalk, “how come you claimed I was your husband?”

“Well, what else could I tell people? How would anyone give us a room if they didn’t think we were married? Besides: I feel married. It didn’t even feel like I was telling a story.”

“ ‘Lie’ is what they call it up here,” he told her. “They don’t pussyfoot around calling it a ‘story.’ ”

“Well, I can’t help that. Down home it’s rude to say ‘lie,’ as you very well know your own self.” She gave him a little poke in the ribs, and they started walking again. “Anyhow,” she said, “neither one applies, not ‘lie’ nor ‘story’ neither. I honestly feel like you and I have been husband and wife forever, from a time before we were born, even.”

Junior couldn’t think where to begin to argue with that.

They had reached his car now and he walked around to the driver’s side and got in and started the engine, leaving Linnie Mae to open the passenger door herself. If it weren’t that she was the only one who knew where all his earthly belongings were, he would gladly have left her behind.

The new room was not nicer than the old one. It was even smaller, in a millworker’s squat clapboard house about five blocks south of Mrs. Davies’s. The bed was a single with a sunken-in mattress, admittedly wider than the cot at Mrs. Davies’s but not by much, and there was a water stain on the ceiling near the window. But Cora Lee seemed pleasant enough — a plump, brown-haired woman in her early thirties — and almost her first words as she was showing him the room were, “Now, I want you to tell us if anything’s not right, because we’ve never taken in roomers before and we don’t know just how it’s done.”

“Well,” Junior said, “in the old place, I was paying four dollars. We were paying four dollars.”

But from the way Cora Lee’s face suddenly lurched and froze, he could tell she had set her heart on five. A cannier man might have argued even so, but Junior didn’t have it in him and he changed the subject to the bathroom arrangements. Cora Lee looked happy again. Now that her husband wasn’t working, she said, Junior was welcome to take first turn at the bathroom in the mornings. Linnie, meanwhile, was bustling around needlessly straightening the bedspread. Plainly she found money talk embarrassing.

Once Cora Lee had left them on their own, Linnie came to stand in front of him and wrap her arms around him as if they were honeymooners or something, but he freed himself and went to check the closet. “Where’s my Prince Albert tin?” he asked.

“It’s in with your shaving things.”

He reached down a wrinkled paper bag from the closet shelf. Sure enough, there was the tin, and his roll of bills was still folded inside it. He put it back. “We need to buy something for supper,” he said.

“Oh, I’m taking us out for supper.”

“Out where?”

“Did you see that place on the corner? Sam and David’s Eatery. Cora Lee says it’s clean. Tonight’s special is the meatloaf plate, twenty cents apiece.”

“Forty cents total, that means,” he said. “One of those tall cans of salmon from the grocery store is not but twenty-three cents, and it lasts me half a week.”

Although it wouldn’t last both of them half a week, he realized, and he felt something close to fear at the thought of having to feed two instead of one.

“But I want us to celebrate,” Linnie said. “It’s our first real night together; last night didn’t count. And I want me to be the one that pays.”

He said, “How much money have you got, anyhow?”

“Seven dollars and fifty-eight cents!” Linnie said, as if it were something to brag about.

He sighed. “You’re better off saving it up,” he told her.

“Just this once, Junie? Just on our first night?”

“Could you please not call me Junie?” he said.

But he was already putting his jacket back on.

Out on the street Linnie was jubilant, hanging on to his arm and chattering away as they walked. She said Cora Lee had offered them half a shelf in the icebox. “The refrigerator,” she corrected herself. “They have a Kelvinator. We could keep our milk there and some cheese, and then when I know her better I’ll ask to use her stove one time. I’ll clean up after myself real good so she lets me use it again, and next thing you know it will be like the kitchen’s our own. I know just how to work it.”

Junior could well believe it.

“Also I’m getting a job,” she said. “I’m finding me one tomorrow.”

“Now, how are you going to do that?” Junior asked. “It’s not like a thousand grown men aren’t pounding these same streets hunting any work they can hustle up.”

“Oh, I’ll find something. Just wait.”

He drew away and walked separate from her. He felt he was caught in strands of taffy: pull her off the fingers of one hand and then she was sticking to the other. But he had to play his cards right, because he needed that room she had got them. Assuming he couldn’t somehow persuade Mrs. Davies to take him back.

Sam and David’s was tiny, with its specials listed in whitewash on the steamy front window. The twenty-cent meatloaf plate included bread and string beans. Junior let Linnie tug him inside. There were four small tables and a counter with six stools; Linnie chose a table although Junior would have felt easier at the counter. The customers at the counter were lone men in work clothes, while those at the tables were couples.

“You don’t have to have the meatloaf,” Linnie told him. “You can get something pricier.”

“Meatloaf will be fine.”

A woman in an apron came out and filled their water glasses, and Linnie beamed up at her and said, “Well, hey there! I am Linnie Mae, and this here is Junior. We’ve just moved into the neighborhood.”

“Is that so,” the woman said. “Well, I am Bertha. Sam’s wife. I bet you’re staying at the Murphys’, aren’t you.”

“Now, how did you know that?”

“Cora Lee stopped by and told me. She was just real tickled she’d found such a nice young couple. I said, ‘Honey, they’re the ones should be tickled.’ There’s no finer people around than Cora Lee and Joe Murphy.”

“I could tell that,” Linnie said. “I could tell straight off. I took one look at that sweet smiling face of hers and I could tell. She’s just like the people back home.”

“We’re all like the people back home,” Bertha said. “We all are the people back home. That’s what Hampden’s made up of.”

“Well, aren’t we lucky, then!”

Junior studied the price list on the wall behind the counter until they were finished talking.

Over the meatloaf, which turned out to taste better than anything he’d eaten in a good long while, Linnie told him she had a plan to lower their room rent. “You will keep your eyes open for some little thing that needs fixing,” she said. “Some loose board or saggy hinge or something. You’ll ask Cora Lee if it would be all right if you saw to it. Don’t mention money or nothing.”

“Anything,” he said.

She clamped her mouth shut.

“You’ve got to stop talking so country if you want to fit in here,” he told her.

“Well, and then a few days later you will fix something else. This time don’t ask; just fix it. She’ll hear the hammering and come running. ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ you tell her. ‘I just noticed it and I couldn’t resist.’ Of course she’ll say she doesn’t mind a bit; you can see from that leak in our ceiling that her husband’s not going to do it. Then you’ll say, ‘You know,’ you’ll say, ‘I’ve been thinking. Seems to me you want someone around to keep this house repaired, and it’s occurred to me that we might could work something out.’ ”

“Linnie, I think they need the cash,” he told her.

“Cash?”

“They’d rather let the house fall apart and go on eating, is what I’m saying.”

“Well, how could that be? They still need a roof over their heads! They still need a roof that doesn’t leak.”

“Tell me: are people not having hard times in Yancey County?” Junior asked.

“Well, sure they’re having hard times! Half the stores are closed and everyone’s out of work.”

“Then why don’t you understand about the Murphys? They’re probably one payment away from losing their house to the bank.”

“Oh,” Linnie Mae said.

“Nothing’s the same anymore,” he said. “No one’s in any position to cut us a deal. And no one can give you a job. You’ll use up your seven dollars and that will be the end of it, and I can’t afford to support you even if I wanted to. Do you know what’s in my Prince Albert tin? Forty-three dollars. That’s my entire life savings. It used to be a hundred and twenty before things changed. I’ve gone without for years, even in better times — given up smoking, given up drinking, eaten worse than my daddy’s dogs used to eat, and if my stomach felt too hollow I’d walk to the grocery store and buy a pickle from out of the barrel for a penny; a sour dill pickle can really kill a man’s appetite. I was Mrs. Davies’s longest-lasting roomer, and it’s not because I liked fighting five other men for the bathroom; it’s because I had ambitions. I wanted to start my own business. I wanted to build fine houses for people who knew to appreciate them — real slates on the roofs, real tiles on the floors, no more tarpaper and linoleum. I’d have good men under me, say Dodd McDowell and Gary Sherman from Ward Builders, and I’d drive my own truck with my company’s name on the sides. But for that, I’d need customers, and there aren’t any nowadays. Now I see it’s never going to happen.”

“Well, of course it will happen!” Linnie said. “Junior Whitshank! You think I don’t know, but I do: you went all the way through Mountain City High and never made less than an A. And you’ve been carpentering with your daddy since you were just a little thing, and everyone at the lumberyard knew you could answer any question that anybody there asked you. Oh, you’re bound to make it happen!”

“No,” he said, “that’s not the way it works anymore.” And then he said, “You need to go home, Linnie.”

Her lips flew apart. She said, “Home?”

“Have you even finished high school? You haven’t, have you.”

She raised her chin, which was answer enough.

“And your people will be wondering where you are.”

“It’s all the same to me if they’re wondering,” she said. “Anyhow, they don’t care. You know that me and Mama have never gotten along.”

“Still,” he said.

“And Daddy has not spoken to me in the last four years and ten months.”

Junior set his fork down. “What: not a word?” he asked.

“Not a single word. If he needs me to pass the salt, he tells Mama, ‘Get her to pass me the salt.’ ”

“Well, that is just spiteful,” Junior said.

“Oh, Junior, what did you imagine? I’d get caught with a boy in the hay barn and next day they’d all forget? For a while I thought you might come for me. I used to picture how it would happen. You’d pull up in your brother-in-law’s truck as I was walking down Pee Creek Road and ‘Get in,’ you’d tell me. ‘I’m taking you away from here.’ Then I thought maybe you’d send me a letter, with my ticket money inside. I’d have packed up and left in a minute, if you’d done that! It wasn’t only my daddy who didn’t speak to me; not much of anyone did. Even my two brothers acted different around me, and the girls who were nicey-nice at school were just trying to get close, it turned out, so that I’d tell them all the details. I thought when I went on to high school they wouldn’t know about it and I could make a fresh start, but of course they knew, because the kids from grade school who came along with me told them. ‘There’s Linnie Mae Inman,’ they’d say; ‘her and her boyfriend paraded stark nekkid through her brother’s graduation party.’ Because that’s what it had grown into, by then.”

“You act like it was my fault,” he told her. “You’re the one who started it.”

“I won’t say I didn’t. I was bad. But I was in love. I’m still in love! And I know that you are, too.”

He said, “Linnie—”

“Please, Junior,” she said. She was smiling, he didn’t know why, but there were tears in her eyes. “Give me a chance. Can’t you please do that? Don’t let’s talk about it just now; let’s enjoy our supper. Isn’t our supper good? Isn’t the meatloaf delicious?”

He looked down at his plate. “Yes,” he said, “it is.”

But he didn’t pick his fork up again.

On the walk home, she began asking him about his day-to-day life: how he spent his evenings, what he did on weekends, whether he had any friends. Even though he’d drunk nothing but water with his meal, he started to get that elated feeling that alcohol used to give him. It must have come from spilling all the words that he had kept stored up for so long. Because the fact was that he didn’t have any friends, not since Ward Builders shut down and he’d lost touch with the other workmen. (To be social, a person needed money — or men did, at any rate. They needed to buy liquor and hamburgers and gas; they couldn’t just sit around idle, chitchatting the way women did.) He told Linnie he did nothing with his evenings, he’d often as not spend them washing his clothes in the bathtub; and when she laughed, he said, “No, I mean it. And weekends I sleep a lot.” He was past shame; he told her straight out, not trying to look popular or successful or worldly-wise. They climbed the steps of the Murphys’ house and let themselves in the front door, passing the closed-off parlor where they could hear a radio playing — some kind of dance-band music — and the sound of two children good-naturedly squabbling about something. “You peeked; I saw!” “No I didn’t!” Even though it wasn’t Junior’s parlor and he had never met those children, he got a homey feeling.

They climbed the stairs and went to their room (no lock on this door), and right away Junior started worrying about what next. On his own, he would have gone to bed, since he always got such an early start in the mornings, but that might give Linnie the wrong idea. She might have the wrong idea even now; he sensed it from the demure way she took her coat off, and the care she took hanging it up. She removed her hat and placed it on the closet shelf. Her hair was in disarray and she patted it tentatively with just the tips of her fingers, keeping her back to him, as if she were getting ready for him. Something about the pale, meek nape of her neck, exposed by the accidental parting of her hair at the rear of her head, made him feel sorry for her. He cleared his throat and said, “Linnie Mae.”

She turned and said, “What?” And then she said, “Take your jacket off, why don’t you? Make yourself comfortable.”

“See, I’m trying to be honest,” he said. “I’d like to get everything clear between us.”

The beginnings of a crease developed between her eyebrows.

“I feel bad about what you’ve been through back home,” he said. “I guess it wasn’t much fun. But when you think about it, Linnie, what have we really got to do with each other? We hardly know each other! We went out together less than a month! And I’m trying to make it on my own up here. It’s hard enough for one; it’s impossible for two. Back home, at least you’ve got family. They’d never let you starve, no matter how they feel about you. I think you ought to go home.”

“You’re just saying that because you’re mad at me,” she told him.

“What? No, I’m not—”

“You’re mad I didn’t tell you how old I was, but why didn’t you ask how old I was? Why didn’t you ask if I was in school, or whether I worked someplace, or how I spent all the time that I wasn’t with you? Why weren’t you interested in me?”

“What? I was interested, honest!”

“Oh, we both know what you were interested in!”

“Hold on,” he said. “Is that fair? Who was the first to start taking her clothes off, might I remind you? And who dragged me into that barn? Who made me put my hand on her? Were you interested in how I spent my time?”

“Yes, I was,” she said. “And I asked you. Only you never bothered answering, because you were too busy trying to get me on my back. I said, ‘Tell me about your life, Junior; come on, I want to know everything about you.’ But did you tell me? No. You’d just start unbuttoning my buttons.”

Junior felt he was losing an argument that he didn’t even care about. He had wanted to make an entirely different point. He said, “Shoot, Linnie Mae,” and jammed his fists hard in his jacket pockets, except something in his left pocket stopped him and he pulled it out and looked at it. Half a sandwich, wrapped in a handkerchief.

“What’s that?” she asked him.

“It’s a … sandwich.”

“What kind of sandwich?”

“Egg? Egg.”

“Where’d you get an egg sandwich?”

“Lady I worked for today,” he said. “Half I ate and half I brought home to give to you, but then you were all set on us going out for supper.”

“Oh, Junior,” she said. “That’s so sweet!”

“No, I was just—”

“That was so nice of you!” she said, and she took the sandwich out of his hand, handkerchief and all. Her face was pink; she suddenly looked pretty. “I love it that you brought me a sandwich,” she said. She unwrapped it, reverently, and studied it a moment and then looked up at him with her eyes brimming.

“It’s squashed, though,” he said.

“I don’t care if it’s squashed! I love it that you thought about me while you were away at work. Oh, Junior, I’ve been so lonely all these years! You don’t know how lonely I’ve been. I’ve been so all, all alone all this time!”

And she flung herself on him, still holding that sandwich, and started sobbing.

After a moment, Junior lifted his arms and hugged her back.

She didn’t find a job, of course. That part of her plan didn’t work out. But her kitchen-sharing plan did. She and Cora Lee got to be friends, and they cooked together in the kitchen while they talked about whatever women talk about, and before long it just made more sense for Junior and Linnie to eat their meals with Cora Lee and her family. Then when the weather turned warm the two women hatched a plot to buy fruits and vegetables from the farmers who rolled into Hampden on their wagons, and they’d spend all day canning, blasting the kitchen with heat; and later Linnie would be the brave one who went around hawking their products to the neighbors. They didn’t make much money, but they made some.

And Junior actually did fix up a few things around the house, just because otherwise they would never have gotten done, but he didn’t charge anything or try to get a deal on the rent.

Even after times improved and Junior and Linnie moved into the house on Cotton Street, Linnie and Cora Lee stayed friends. Well, Linnie was friends with everybody, it seemed to Junior. Sometimes he wondered if those years of being an outcast had left her with an unnatural need to socialize. He’d come in after work and find wall-to-wall women in the kitchen, and all their mingled young ones playing in the backyard. “Don’t I get supper?” he would ask, and the women would scatter, rounding up their children on the way out. But he wouldn’t say Linnie was lazy. Oh, no. She and Cora still had their little canning business, and she answered the phone for Junior and saw to the billing and such as he began to have more customers. She was better with the customers than he was, in fact, always willing to take time for a little small talk, and adept at smoothing over any problems or complaints.

By then he had his truck — used, but it was a good one — and he had a few men working for him, and he owned a fine collection of tools that he’d bought from other men here and there who were down on their luck. These were really solid tools, the old-fashioned, beautifully made kind. A saw, for instance, with an oiled wooden handle that was carved with the most delicate and precise etching of a rosemary branch. It was true that the sweat that darkened the handle had not been his forebears’ sweat, but still he felt some personal pride in it. He always took excellent care of his tools. And he always went to lumberyards where he could choose his own lumber board by board. “Now, fellows, I know anything you might take it into your heads to put over on me. Don’t give me anything with dead knots, don’t give me anything warped or moldy …”

“What if I had been married?” he thought to ask Linnie years later. “What if you’d come up north and found me with a wife and six children?”

“Oh, Junior,” she said. “You would never do that.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Well, for one thing, how would you get six children inside of just five years?”

“No, but, you know what I mean.”

She just smiled.

She acted older than he was, in some ways, and yet in other ways she seemed permanently thirteen — feisty and defiant, and stubbornly opinionated. He was taken aback to see how easily she had severed all connection with her family. It implied a level of bitterness that he had not suspected her capable of. She showed no desire to shed her backwoods style of speech; she still said “holler” for “shout,” and “tuckered” for “tired,” and “treckly” for “directly.” She still insisted on calling him “Junie.” She had an irritating habit of ostentatiously chuckling to herself before she told him something funny, as if she were coaching him to chuckle. She pressed too close to him when she wanted to persuade him of something. She plucked at his sleeve with picky fingers while he was talking to other people.

Oh, the terrible, crushing, breath-stealing burden of people who think they own you!

And if Junior was the wild one, how come it was Linnie Mae who’d caused every single bit of trouble he’d found himself in since they’d met?

He was a sharp-boned, narrow-ribbed man, a man without an ounce of fat who had never had much interest in food, but sometimes when he came home from work in the late afternoon and Linnie was out back gabbing with her next-door neighbor he would stand in front of the refrigerator and eat all the leftover pork chops and then the wieners, the cold mashed potatoes, the cold peas and the boiled beets, foods he didn’t even like, as if he were starving, as if he had never gotten what he really wanted, and later Linnie would say, “Have you seen those peas I was saving? Where are those peas?” and he would stay stone silent. She had to know. What did she think: little Merrick craved cold peas? But she never said so. This made him feel both grateful and resentful. Lord it over him, would she! She must really think she had his number!

At such moments he would run his mind back through that long-ago trip to the train station, this time doing it differently. Down the dark streets, turn right past the station, turn right again onto Charles Street and drive back to the boardinghouse. Let himself into his room and lock the door behind him. Drop onto his cot. Fall asleep alone.

13

JUNIOR HAD EUGENE take the porch swing down to Tilghman Brothers, an establishment near the waterfront where Whitshank Construction sent customers’ shutters when they were so thick with paint that they resembled half-sucked toffees. Evidently the Tilghman brothers owned a giant vat of some caustic solution that stripped everything to the bare wood. “Tell them we need the swing back in exactly a week,” Junior told Eugene.

“A week from today?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Boss, those fellows can take a month with such things. They don’t like to be hurried.”

“Tell them it’s an emergency. Say we’ll pay extra, if we have to. Moving day is two Sundays from now, and I want the swing hanging by then.”

“Well, I’ll try, boss,” Eugene said.

Junior could see that Eugene was thinking this was an awful lot of fuss for a mere porch swing, but he had the good sense not to say so. Eugene was an experiment — Junior’s first colored employee, hired when the draft had claimed one of the company’s painters. He was working out okay, so far. In fact, last week Junior had hired another.

Linnie Mae had been worrying lately that Junior would be drafted himself. When he pointed out that he was forty-two years old, she said, “I don’t care; they could raise the draft age any day now. Or you might decide to enlist.”

“Enlist!” he said. “What kind of fool do you take me for?”

He had the feeling sometimes that his life was like a railroad car that had been shunted onto a side track for years — all the wasted, wild years of his youth and the years of the Depression. He was lagging behind; he was running to catch up; he was finally on the main track and he would be damned if some war in Europe was going to stop him.

When the swing came back it was virgin wood — a miracle. Not the tiniest speck of blue in the least little seam. Junior walked all around it, marveling. “Lord, I hate to think what-all they must have in that vat,” he told Eugene.

Eugene chuckled. “You want I should varnish it?” he asked.

“No,” Junior said, “I’ll do that.”

Eugene shot him a look of surprise, but he didn’t comment.

The two of them carried it out back and set it upside down on a drop cloth, so that Junior could varnish the underside first and give it time to dry before he turned it over. It was a warm May day with no rain in the forecast, so Junior figured he could safely leave it out overnight and come back the next morning to do the rest.

Like most carpenters, he had an active dislike of painting, and also he was conscious that he wasn’t very good at it. But for some reason it seemed important to accomplish this task on his own, and he worked carefully and patiently, even though this was the part of the swing that wouldn’t show. It was a pleasant occupation, really. The sunlight was filtering through the trees, and a breeze was cooling his face, and “Chattanooga Choo Choo” was playing in his mind.

You leave the Pennsylvania Station ’bout a quarter to four,

Read a magazine and then you’re in Baltimore …

When he was done, he cleaned his brush and put away the varnish and the mineral spirits, and he went home for supper feeling pleased with himself.

The next morning he came back to finish the job. The swing was dry, but a fine dusting of pollen was stuck to the underside of the seat. He should have foreseen that. No wonder he hated painting! Cursing beneath his breath, he dragged the drop cloth toward the back porch with the swing along for the ride. Then he spread another drop cloth inside the enclosed end of the porch and hauled the swing in and set it right side up. This was going to be done properly, by God. He tried to forget how the lower surfaces of the armrests had rasped against his fingertips when he grabbed hold of them.

Eugene had painted the back porch interior earlier in the week, and the smells of paint and varnish combined to make Junior feel slightly light-headed. He drew the brush along the wood with dreamy strokes. Wasn’t it interesting how the grain of the wood told a story, almost — how you could follow the threads and be surprised at how far they traveled, or where they unexpectedly broke off.

He wondered if someday Merrick would be proposed to in this swing, if Redcliffe’s children would swoop back and forth in it so raucously that their mother would seize the ropes to slow it down.

After Junior learned how a man could feel about his children, he had conceived a deep and permanent anger toward his father. His father had had six sons and a daughter, and he’d let them loose easier than a dog lets loose of her pups. The older Junior got, the harder he found it to understand that.

He made a quick, sharp, shaking-away motion with his head, and he dipped his brush again.

This varnish was the color of buckwheat honey. It drew out the character of the wood and added depth. No more of those eternal Swedish-blue swings of home! No more raggedy braided rugs and rusted metal gliders; no more baby-blue porch ceilings that were meant, he supposed, to suggest the sky; no more battleship-gray porch floors.

Linnie was going to start up the walk on moving day, and at the foot of the porch steps, “Oh!” she would say. She would be staring at the swing; one hand would fly to her mouth. “Oh, why—!” Or maybe not. Maybe she would conceal her surprise; she might be crafty enough. Either way, Junior himself would climb the steps without breaking stride. He wouldn’t give a sign that anything was different. “Shall we go in?” he would ask her, and he would turn to her and gesture hospitably toward the front door.

There was a satisfaction to imagining this scene, and yet he felt something was lacking. She wouldn’t fully realize all that lay behind it: his shock at what she had done and his outrage and his sense of injustice, and his hard work to repair the damage. Eugene’s trip to Tilghman Brothers, the exorbitant fee they had charged for the expedited service (exactly double their regular fee), Junior’s two separate trips to apply the varnish and the final trip he would make Friday morning to screw the eyebolts back in and reattach the ropes on their figure eights and hang the swing from the ceiling: she would have no idea of any of that. It echoed the pattern of their lives together — all the secrets he had kept from her despite his temptation to tell. She would never know how deeply he had longed to free himself all these years, how he had stayed with her only because he knew she would be lost otherwise, how onerous it had been to go on and on, day after day, setting right what he had done wrong. No, she had absolute faith that he had stayed because he loved her. And if he told her otherwise — if he somehow managed to convince her of his sacrifice — she would be crushed, and the sacrifice would have been for nothing.

He circled each spindle with his brush, smoothing varnish into each joint, tracing the crevices of the lathing with tender, caressing strokes.

Dinner in the diner,

nothing could be finer

Than to have your ham ’n’ eggs in Carolina …

On Friday when he went back to hang the swing he took along more boxes from home and a few small pieces of furniture — the play table from the children’s room and the little chairs that went with it. Might as well haul as much as possible over ahead of time. He parked in the rear and carried everything in through the kitchen and up the stairs. While he was up there, he indulged himself in a survey of his new property. He stood at the hall railing to admire the gleaming entrance hall below, and he stepped into the main bedroom to gloat over its spaciousness. His and Linnie’s beds were already in place — twin beds, like those the Brills had had, delivered last week by Shofer’s. Linnie couldn’t understand why they didn’t keep on sharing their old double, but Junior said, “It just makes more sense, when you think about it. You know how I’m always tossing and turning in the middle of the night.”

“I don’t mind you tossing and turning,” Linnie said.

“Well, we’ll just try this out, why don’t we. We’re not throwing the double away, after all. If we change our minds we can always move it back in from the guest room.”

Although privately, he had no intention of moving it back. He liked the idea of twin beds — their Hollywood-style glamour. Besides, he’d spent enough of his childhood sharing a bed with various brothers.

In the far corner of the bedroom stood the Brills’ armoire, which he also considered glamorous. It made his cheeks burn, though, to remember that he had first understood it to be called a “more.” “Mrs. Brill,” he had said, “I hear you’re not taking your more to the new place. You think I could buy it off you?”

Mrs. Brill’s eyebrows had knotted. “My—?” she said.

“Your more in the bedroom. Your boy said it was too big.”

“Oh! Why, certainly. Jim? Junior was just wondering if he could buy our armoire.”

It wasn’t till then that Junior had realized his mistake. He was furious at Mrs. Brill for witnessing it, even though he had to admit that she had behaved very tactfully.

In a way, it was her tact he was furious at.

Oh, always, always it was us-and-them. Whether it was the town kids in high school or the rich people in Roland Park, always someone to point out that he wasn’t quite measuring up, he didn’t quite make the grade. And it was assumed to be his own fault, because he lived in a nation where theoretically, he could make the grade. There was nothing to hold him back. Except that there was something; he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. There was always some little tiny trick of dress or of speech that kept him on the outside looking in.

Nonsense. Enough. He owned a giant cedar-lined closet now that was meant for storing nothing but woolens. The wallpaper in this bedroom came all the way from France. The windows were so tall that when he stood at one, a person down on the street could see from the top of Junior’s head almost to his knees.

But then he noticed a patch of blistered paint at the corner of one sill. The Brills must have left that window open during a rainstorm. Or else it was the result of condensation; that would not be good.

Also, the wallpaper underneath it was showing its seam too distinctly. In fact, the seam was separating. In fact, where the paper met the sill it was actually curling up from the wall a tiny bit.

Saturday was the day he went around giving estimates; that was when the husbands were home. So he didn’t stop by the new house. He wrapped up his appointments early, because tomorrow they were moving and there was still some packing to do. He got home about three o’clock and walked on through to the kitchen, where he found Linnie pulling cleaning supplies from the orange crate under the sink. She was kneeling on the floor, and the soles of her bare feet, which were facing him, were gray with dirt. “I’m home,” he told her.

“Oh, good. Could you reach down that platter from up top of the icebox? I clean forgot about it! I like to walked off and left it.”

He reached for the platter on the refrigerator and placed it on the counter. “I’ve half a mind to take another load to the house before it gets dark,” he told her. “It would make things that much easier in the morning.”

“Oh, don’t do that. You’ll wear yourself out. Wait for tomorrow when Dodd and them get here.”

“I wouldn’t take the heavy stuff. Just a few boxes and such.”

She didn’t answer. He wished she would get her head out of the orange crate and look at him, but she was all hustle-bustle, so after a minute he left her.

In the living room, the children were piling up empty cartons to build something. Or Merrick was. Redcliffe was still too little to have any plan in mind, but he was thrilled that Merrick was playing with him and he staggered around happily, dragging boxes wherever she told him to. The rug had been rolled up for the move and it gave them an expanse of bare floorboards. “Look at our castle, Daddy,” Merrick said, and Junior said, “Very nice,” and went on back to the bedroom to change out of his good clothes. He always wore his suit when he was giving estimates.

When he returned to the kitchen, Linnie was packing the cleaning supplies in a Duz carton. “Mrs. Abbott’s husband said no to half the features she was wanting,” Junior said. “He went straight down the list: ‘Why’s this cost so much? Why’s this?’ I wished I had known he would do that way before I went to all that trouble with my figures.”

“That’s a shame,” Linnie Mae said. “Maybe she’ll talk to him later and get him to change his mind.”

“No, she was just going along with it. ‘Oh,’ she said, all sad and mournful, each time he crossed something off.”

He waited for Linnie to comment, but she didn’t. She was wrapping a bottle of ammonia in a dish towel. He wished she would look at him. He was starting to feel uneasy.

Linnie Mae wasn’t the type to shout or sulk or throw things when she was mad about something; she would just stop looking at him. Well, she would look if she had some cause to, but she wouldn’t study him. She would speak pleasantly enough, she would smile, she would act the same as ever, and yet always there seemed to be something else claiming her attention. At such times, he surprised himself by his urgent need of her gaze. All at once he would realize how often she did look at him, how her eyes would linger on him as if she just purely enjoyed the sight of him.

He couldn’t think of any reason she would be mad at this moment, though. He was the one who should be mad — and was mad. Still, he hated this feeling of uncertainty. He walked over to stand squarely in front of her, with only the Duz carton between them, and he said, “Would you like to eat at the diner tonight?”

They seldom ate at the diner. It had to be a special occasion. But Linnie didn’t look at him, even so. She said, “I reckon we’ll have to, because I took everything in the icebox over to the house today.”

“You did?” he said. “How come?”

“Oh, Doris was keeping the children so I could get some packing done, and I just thought, ‘Why don’t I visit the new house on my own?’ You know I’ve never done that. So I packed up two bags of food and I caught the streetcar over.”

“We could have put the food on the truck tomorrow,” Junior said. His mind was racing. Had she seen the revarnished swing? She must have. He said, “I don’t know why you thought you had to lug all that by yourself.”

“I just figured I was going anyhow, so I might as well carry something,” she said. “And this way we can have breakfast there tomorrow, out of the way of the men.”

She was focusing on the canister of Bon Ami that she was setting upright in one corner of the carton.

“Well,” he said, “how’d the place look to you?”

“It looked okay,” she said. She fitted a long-handled scrub brush into another corner. “The door sticks, though.”

“Door?”

“The front door.”

So she had definitely gone in through the front. Well, of course she had, walking from the streetcar stop.

He said, “That door doesn’t stick!”

“You push down the thumb latch and it won’t give. For a moment I figured I just hadn’t unlocked it right, but when I pulled the door toward me a little first and then pushed down, it gave.”

“That’s the weather stripping,” Junior said. “It’s got good thick weather stripping, is why it does like that. That door does not stick.”

“Well, it seemed to me like it did.”

“Well, it doesn’t.”

He waited. He almost asked her. He almost came straight out and said, “Did you notice the swing? Were you surprised to see it back the way it was? Don’t you have to agree now that it looks better that way?”

But that would be laying himself open, letting her know he cared for her opinion. Or letting her think he cared.

She might tell him the swing looked silly; it was a trying-too-hard copy of a rich person’s swing; he was pretending to be someone he was not.

So all he said was, “You’ll be glad to have that weather stripping when winter comes, believe me.”

Linnie fitted a box of soap flakes next to the Bon Ami. After a moment, he left the room.

Walking to the diner in the twilight, they passed people sitting out on their porches, and everyone — friend or stranger — said “Evening,” or “Nice night.” Linnie said, “I hope the neighbors will say hey to us in the new place.”

“Why, of course they will,” Junior said.

He had Redcliffe riding on his shoulders. Merrick scooted ahead of them on her old wooden Kiddie Kar, propelling it with her feet. She was way too big for it now, but they couldn’t buy her a tricycle on account of the rubber shortage.

“That Mrs. Brill,” Linnie said. “Remember how she’d talk about ‘my’ grocer and ‘my’ druggist? Like they belonged to her! At Christmastime, when she’d drop off our basket: ‘I got the mistletoe from my florist,’ she’d say, and I’d think, ‘Wouldn’t the florist be surprised to hear he’s yours!’ I surely hope our new neighbors aren’t going to talk like that.”

“She didn’t mean it like it sounded,” Junior said. Then he took two long strides ahead of her and turned so that he was walking backwards, looking into her face. “She probably just meant that our florist might not carry mistletoe, but hers did.”

Linnie laughed. “Our florist!” she echoed. “Can you imagine?”

But her eyes were on old Mr. Early, who was hosing down his steps, and she waved to him and called, “How you doing, Mr. Early?”

Junior gave up and faced forward again.

The longest she’d ever stopped looking at him was when she wanted to have a baby and he didn’t. She’d wanted one for several years and he had kept putting her off — not enough money, not the right time — and she had accepted it, for a while. Then finally he had said, “Linnie Mae, the plain truth is I don’t ever want children.” She had been stunned. She had cried; she had argued; she had claimed he only felt that way on account of what had happened with his mother. (His mother had died in childbirth, taking the baby with her. But that had nothing to do with it. Really! He had long ago put that behind him.) And then by and by, Linnie had just seemed to stop savoring the sight of him. He had to admit that he had felt the lack. He’d always known, even without her saying so, that she found him handsome. Not that he cared about such things! But still, he had been conscious of it, and now something was missing.

He had been the one to give in, that time. He had lasted about a week. Then he’d said, “Listen. If we were to have children …” and the sudden, alerted sweep of her eyes across his face had made him feel the way a parched plant must feel when it’s finally given water.

Over supper he talked to Merrick and Redcliffe about how they would have their own rooms now. Redcliffe was busy squeezing the skins off his lima beans, but Merrick said, “I can’t wait. I hate sharing my room! Redcliffe smells like pee every morning.”

“Be nice, now,” Linnie Mae told her. “You used to smell like pee, too.”

“I never!”

“You did when you were a baby.”

“Redcliffe is a baby!” Merrick teased Redcliffe in a singsong.

Redcliffe popped another lima bean.

“Who wants ice cream?” Junior asked.

Merrick said, “I do!” and Redcliffe said, “I do!”

“Linnie Mae?” Junior asked.

“That would be nice,” Linnie Mae said.

But she was turned in Redcliffe’s direction now, wiping lima-bean skins off his fingers.

It was their custom to listen to the radio together after the children had gone to bed — Linnie sewing or mending, Junior reviewing the next day’s work plan. But the living room was a jumble now, and the radio was packed in a carton. Linnie said, “I guess maybe I’ll head off to bed myself,” and Junior said, “I’ll be up in a minute.”

He spent a while packing his business papers for the move, and then he turned out the lights and went upstairs. Linnie had her nightgown on but she was still puttering around the bedroom, putting the items on top of the bureau into drawers. She said, “Are you going to need the alarm clock?”

“Naw, I’m bound to wake on my own,” he said.

He stripped to his underthings and hung his shirt and overalls on the hooks inside the closet door, although as a rule he would have just slung them onto the chair since he’d be wearing them tomorrow. “Our last night in this house, Linnie Mae,” he said.

“Mm-hmm.”

She folded the bureau scarf and laid it in the top drawer.

“Our last night in this bed, even.”

She crossed to the closet and gathered a handful of empty hangers.

“But I can still visit you in your new bed,” he said, and he gave her rear end a playful tap as she walked past him.

She made a subtle sort of tucking-in move that caused his tap to glance off of her, and she bent to fit the hangers into the bureau drawer.

“Junior,” she said, “tell me the truth: where did that burglar’s kit come from?”

“Burglar’s kit? What burglar’s kit?”

“The one in Mrs. Brill’s sunroom. You know the one I mean.”

“I don’t have the slightest idea,” he said.

He got into bed and pulled the covers up, turned his face to the wall and closed his eyes. He heard Linnie cross to the closet again and scrape another collection of hangers along the rod. Outside the open window a car passed — an older model, from the putt-putt sound of it — and somebody’s dog started barking.

A few minutes later he heard her pad toward the bed, and he felt her settling onto her side of it. She lay down and then turned away from him; he felt the slight tug of the covers. The lamp on her nightstand clicked off.

He wondered how she had reacted when she first saw the revarnished swing. Had she blinked? Had she gasped? Had she exclaimed aloud?

He had a vision of her as she must have looked trudging up the walk with her two bags of food: Linnie Mae Inman in her country-looking straw hat with the wooden cherries on the brim, and her cotton dress with the cuffed short sleeves that exposed her scrawny arms and roughened elbows. It made him feel … hurt, for some reason. It hurt his feelings on her behalf. All alone, she would have been, threading up the hill beneath those giant poplars toward that wide front porch. All alone she must have figured out the streetcar, which was one she hadn’t taken before — she only ever went down to the department stores on Howard Street — and she’d decided which way to turn at the corner where she got off, and she had no doubt tilted her chin pridefully as she walked past the other houses in case the neighbors happened to be watching.

He opened his eyes and shifted onto his back. “Linnie Mae,” he said toward the ceiling. “Are you awake?”

“I’m awake.”

He turned so his body was cupping hers and he wrapped his arms around her from behind. She didn’t pull away, but she stayed rigid. He took a deep breath of her salty, smoky smell.

“I ask your pardon,” he said.

She was silent.

“I’m just trying so hard, Linnie. I guess I’m trying too hard. I’m just trying to pass muster. I just want to do things the right way, is all.”

“Why, Junior,” she said, and she turned toward him. “Junie, honey, of course you do. I know that. I know you, Junior Whitshank.” And she took his face between her hands.

In the dark he couldn’t see if she was looking at him or not, but he could feel her fingertips tracing his features before she put her lips to his.

Dodd McDowell and Hank Lothian and the new colored man were due to arrive at eight — Junior let his men start a little late when they worked on weekends — so at seven, he drove Linnie and the children to the house along with some boxes of kitchen things. The plan was that she would stay there unpacking while he went back to help load the furniture.

As they were pulling into the street, Doris Nivers from next door came out in her housecoat, carrying a potted plant. Linnie rolled down her window and called, “Morning, Doris!”

“I’m just trying not to bawl my eyes out,” Doris told her. “The neighborhood won’t feel the same! Now, this plant might not look to you like much, but it’s going to flower in a few weeks and give you lots of beautiful zinnias.”

“Zeenias,” she pronounced it, in the Baltimore way. She passed the plant through the window to Linnie, who took it in both hands and sank her nose into it as if it were blooming already. “I won’t say ‘Thank you,’ ” she told Doris, “because I don’t want to kill it off, but you know I’m going to think of you every time I look at it.”

“You just better had! Bye, kiddos. Bye, Junior,” Doris said, and she took a step backward and waved.

“So long, Doris,” Junior said. The children, who were still in a just-awakened stupor, merely stared, but Linnie waved and kept her head out the window till their truck had turned the corner and Doris was out of sight.

“Oh, I’m going to miss her so much!” Linnie told Junior, pulling her head in. She leaned past Redcliffe to set the plant on the floor between her feet. “I feel like I’ve lost my sister or something.”

“You haven’t lost her. You’re moving two miles away! You can invite her over any time you like.”

“No, I know how it will be,” Linnie said. She blotted the skin beneath her right eye and then her left eye with an index finger. “Suppose I ask her to lunch,” she said. “I ask her and Cora Lee and them. If I give them something fancy to eat they’ll say I’m getting above myself, but if I give them what I usually do they’ll say that I must not think they’re as high-class as my new neighbors. And they won’t invite me back; they’ll say their houses wouldn’t suit me anymore, and bit by bit they’ll stop accepting my invitations and that will be the end of it.”

“Linnie Mae. It is not a capital crime to move to a bigger place,” Junior said.

Linnie Mae reached into her pocket to pull out a handkerchief.

When he drew to a stop in front of the house, she asked, “Shouldn’t we park around back? What about all we’ve got to carry?”

“I thought we’d have a bite of breakfast first,” he said.

Which made no sense, really — they could eat breakfast just as well if he had parked in back — but he wanted to give their arrival the proper sense of occasion. And Linnie might have guessed that, because she just said, “Well. See there? Now you’re glad I brought that food over.”

While she was gathering herself together — hunting her purse on the floor and bending for her plant — he came around and opened the door for her. She looked surprised, but she passed Redcliffe to him, and then she stepped down from the truck. “Come on, kids,” Junior said, setting Redcliffe on the ground. “Let’s make our grand entrance.” And the four of them started up the walk.

Under the shelter of the trees the front of the house didn’t get the morning sun, but that just made the deep, shady porch seem homier. And the honey-gold of the swing, visible now through the balustrade, gladdened Junior’s heart. He had to stop himself from saying to Linnie, “See? See how right it looks?”

When his eyes caught a flash of something blue, he blamed it on the power of suggestion — a crazy kind of aftereffect of all that had happened before.

Then he looked again, and he froze.

A trail of blue paint traveled down the flagstones — a scattered explosion of blue starting directly in front of the steps and then collecting itself to proceed in a wide band down the walk, narrowing to a trickle as it approached his shoes. It was so thick that it almost seemed he could peel it up with his fingers; it was so shiny that he instinctively drew back his nearest foot, although on closer inspection he saw that it had dried. And anyone — or was it only Junior? — could tell from the briefest glance that it had been flung in anger.

Linnie, meanwhile, had disengaged her hand from his and gone ahead, calling, “Slow down, Merrick! Slow down, Redcliffe! Your daddy needs to unlock the door!”

It would take his men days to remove this. It would take abrasives and chemicals — offhand, he wasn’t even sure what kind — and scrubbing and scraping and grinding; and still, traces of blue would remain. Really the blue would never come off, not completely. There would be microscopic dots of blue in the mortar forever after, perhaps unnoticed by strangers but evident to Junior. He could see his future unreeling before him as clearly as a movie: how he would try one method, try another, consult the experts, lie awake nights, research different solutions like a man possessed, and no doubt end by having to dig the whole thing up and start over. Failing that, the walk would be marked indelibly, engraved with Swedish blue for all time.

And meanwhile Linnie Mae was heading up the walk with her spine very straight and her hat very level, all innocent and carefree. Not even a glance backward to find out how he was taking this.

Why had he worried for one second about abandoning her at the train station? She would have done just fine without him! She would do just fine anywhere.

She had set out to snag him and succeeded without half trying. She had weathered five years of public scorn entirely on her own. She’d ridden who knows how many trains on who knows how many branch lines and tracked him down without a hitch. He saw her craning her neck by the pickup lane; he saw her ringing strange ladies’ doorbells with her suitcase and her hobo bundle; he saw her laughing in the kitchen with Cora Lee. He saw her yanking his whole life around the way she would yank a damp sweater that she had pulled out of the washtub to block and reshape.

He supposed he should be glad of that last part.

Redcliffe stumbled but righted himself. Merrick was running ahead. “Wait,” Junior called, because they were nearing the steps now. They all stopped and turned toward him, and he walked faster to catch up. Birds were singing in the poplars above him. Small white butterflies were flitting in the one patch of sun. When he reached Linnie’s side he took hold of her hand, and the four of them climbed the steps. They crossed the porch. He unlocked the door. They walked into the house. Their lives began.