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. S
he’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 the
ir 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.