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The new room was not nicer than the old one. It was even smaller, in a millworker’s squat clapboard house about five blocks south of Mrs. Davies’s. The bed was a single with a sunken-in mattress, admittedly wider than the cot at Mrs. Davies’s but not by much, and there was a water stain on the ceiling near the window. But Cora Lee seemed pleasant enough — a plump, brown-haired woman in her early thirties — and almost her first words as she was showing him the room were, “Now, I want you to tell us if anything’s not right, because we’ve never taken in roomers before and we don’t know just how it’s done.”
“Well,” Junior said, “in the old place, I was paying four dollars. We were paying four dollars.”
But from the way Cora Lee’s face suddenly lurched and froze, he could tell she had set her heart on five. A ca
Once Cora Lee had left them on their own, Li
“It’s in with your shaving things.”
He reached down a wrinkled paper bag from the closet shelf. Sure enough, there was the tin, and his roll of bills was still folded inside it. He put it back. “We need to buy something for supper,” he said.
“Oh, I’m taking us out for supper.”
“Out where?”
“Did you see that place on the corner? Sam and David’s Eatery. Cora Lee says it’s clean. Tonight’s special is the meatloaf plate, twenty cents apiece.”
“Forty cents total, that means,” he said. “One of those tall cans of salmon from the grocery store is not but twenty-three cents, and it lasts me half a week.”
Although it wouldn’t last both of them half a week, he realized, and he felt something close to fear at the thought of having to feed two instead of one.
“But I want us to celebrate,” Li
He said, “How much money have you got, anyhow?”
“Seven dollars and fifty-eight cents!” Li
He sighed. “You’re better off saving it up,” he told her.
“Just this once, Junie? Just on our first night?”
“Could you please not call me Junie?” he said.
But he was already putting his jacket back on.
Out on the street Li
Junior could well believe it.
“Also I’m getting a job,” she said. “I’m finding me one tomorrow.”
“Now, how are you going to do that?” Junior asked. “It’s not like a thousand grown men aren’t pounding these same streets hunting any work they can hustle up.”
“Oh, I’ll find something. Just wait.”
He drew away and walked separate from her. He felt he was caught in strands of taffy: pull her off the fingers of one hand and then she was sticking to the other. But he had to play his cards right, because he needed that room she had got them. Assuming he couldn’t somehow persuade Mrs. Davies to take him back.
Sam and David’s was tiny, with its specials listed in whitewash on the steamy front window. The twenty-cent meatloaf plate included bread and string beans. Junior let Li
“You don’t have to have the meatloaf,” Li
“Meatloaf will be fine.”
A woman in an apron came out and filled their water glasses, and Li
“Is that so,” the woman said. “Well, I am Bertha. Sam’s wife. I bet you’re staying at the Murphys’, aren’t you.”
“Now, how did you know that?”
“Cora Lee stopped by and told me. She was just real tickled she’d found such a nice young couple. I said, ‘Honey, they’re the ones should be tickled.’ There’s no finer people around than Cora Lee and Joe Murphy.”
“I could tell that,” Li
“We’re all like the people back home,” Bertha said. “We all are the people back home. That’s what Hampden’s made up of.”
“Well, aren’t we lucky, then!”
Junior studied the price list on the wall behind the counter until they were finished talking.
Over the meatloaf, which turned out to taste better than anything he’d eaten in a good long while, Li
“Anything,” he said.
She clamped her mouth shut.
“You’ve got to stop talking so country if you want to fit in here,” he told her.
“Well, and then a few days later you will fix something else. This time don’t ask; just fix it. She’ll hear the hammering and come ru
“Li
“Cash?”
“They’d rather let the house fall apart and go on eating, is what I’m saying.”
“Well, how could that be? They still need a roof over their heads! They still need a roof that doesn’t leak.”
“Tell me: are people not having hard times in Yancey County?” Junior asked.
“Well, sure they’re having hard times! Half the stores are closed and everyone’s out of work.”
“Then why don’t you understand about the Murphys? They’re probably one payment away from losing their house to the bank.”
“Oh,” Li
“Nothing’s the same anymore,” he said. “No one’s in any position to cut us a deal. And no one can give you a job. You’ll use up your seven dollars and that will be the end of it, and I can’t afford to support you even if I wanted to. Do you know what’s in my Prince Albert tin? Forty-three dollars. That’s my entire life savings. It used to be a hundred and twenty before things changed. I’ve gone without for years, even in better times — given up smoking, given up drinking, eaten worse than my daddy’s dogs used to eat, and if my stomach felt too hollow I’d walk to the grocery store and buy a pickle from out of the barrel for a pe