Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread

“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.

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.