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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?” Li
“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 cla
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 Li
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, Li
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—’ ”