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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 Li
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 Li
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 pla
Up to this point, Li
“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, Li
But Li
In the truck, Merrick sat between Junior and Li
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. Li
“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?”