Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread

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.

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.”