Страница 70 из 79
“Well, of course it will happen!” Li
“No,” he said, “that’s not the way it works anymore.” And then he said, “You need to go home, Li
Her lips flew apart. She said, “Home?”
“Have you even finished high school? You haven’t, have you.”
She raised her chin, which was answer enough.
“And your people will be wondering where you are.”
“It’s all the same to me if they’re wondering,” she said. “Anyhow, they don’t care. You know that me and Mama have never gotten along.”
“Still,” he said.
“And Daddy has not spoken to me in the last four years and ten months.”
Junior set his fork down. “What: not a word?” he asked.
“Not a single word. If he needs me to pass the salt, he tells Mama, ‘Get her to pass me the salt.’ ”
“Well, that is just spiteful,” Junior said.
“Oh, Junior, what did you imagine? I’d get caught with a boy in the hay barn and next day they’d all forget? For a while I thought you might come for me. I used to picture how it would happen. You’d pull up in your brother-in-law’s truck as I was walking down Pee Creek Road and ‘Get in,’ you’d tell me. ‘I’m taking you away from here.’ Then I thought maybe you’d send me a letter, with my ticket money inside. I’d have packed up and left in a minute, if you’d done that! It wasn’t only my daddy who didn’t speak to me; not much of anyone did. Even my two brothers acted different around me, and the girls who were nicey-nice at school were just trying to get close, it turned out, so that I’d tell them all the details. I thought when I went on to high school they wouldn’t know about it and I could make a fresh start, but of course they knew, because the kids from grade school who came along with me told them. ‘There’s Li
“You act like it was my fault,” he told her. “You’re the one who started it.”
“I won’t say I didn’t. I was bad. But I was in love. I’m still in love! And I know that you are, too.”
He said, “Li
“Please, Junior,” she said. She was smiling, he didn’t know why, but there were tears in her eyes. “Give me a chance. Can’t you please do that? Don’t let’s talk about it just now; let’s enjoy our supper. Isn’t our supper good? Isn’t the meatloaf delicious?”
He looked down at his plate. “Yes,” he said, “it is.”
But he didn’t pick his fork up again.
On the walk home, she began asking him about his day-to-day life: how he spent his evenings, what he did on weekends, whether he had any friends. Even though he’d drunk nothing but water with his meal, he started to get that elated feeling that alcohol used to give him. It must have come from spilling all the words that he had kept stored up for so long. Because the fact was that he didn’t have any friends, not since Ward Builders shut down and he’d lost touch with the other workmen. (To be social, a person needed money — or men did, at any rate. They needed to buy liquor and hamburgers and gas; they couldn’t just sit around idle, chitchatting the way women did.) He told Li
They climbed the stairs and went to their room (no lock on this door), and right away Junior started worrying about what next. On his own, he would have gone to bed, since he always got such an early start in the mornings, but that might give Li
She turned and said, “What?” And then she said, “Take your jacket off, why don’t you? Make yourself comfortable.”
“See, I’m trying to be honest,” he said. “I’d like to get everything clear between us.”
The begi
“I feel bad about what you’ve been through back home,” he said. “I guess it wasn’t much fun. But when you think about it, Li
“You’re just saying that because you’re mad at me,” she told him.
“What? No, I’m not—”
“You’re mad I didn’t tell you how old I was, but why didn’t you ask how old I was? Why didn’t you ask if I was in school, or whether I worked someplace, or how I spent all the time that I wasn’t with you? Why weren’t you interested in me?”
“What? I was interested, honest!”
“Oh, we both know what you were interested in!”
“Hold on,” he said. “Is that fair? Who was the first to start taking her clothes off, might I remind you? And who dragged me into that barn? Who made me put my hand on her? Were you interested in how I spent my time?”
“Yes, I was,” she said. “And I asked you. Only you never bothered answering, because you were too busy trying to get me on my back. I said, ‘Tell me about your life, Junior; come on, I want to know everything about you.’ But did you tell me? No. You’d just start unbuttoning my buttons.”
Junior felt he was losing an argument that he didn’t even care about. He had wanted to make an entirely different point. He said, “Shoot, Li
“What’s that?” she asked him.
“It’s a … sandwich.”
“What kind of sandwich?”
“Egg? Egg.”
“Where’d you get an egg sandwich?”
“Lady I worked for today,” he said. “Half I ate and half I brought home to give to you, but then you were all set on us going out for supper.”
“Oh, Junior,” she said. “That’s so sweet!”
“No, I was just—”
“That was so nice of you!” she said, and she took the sandwich out of his hand, handkerchief and all. Her face was pink; she suddenly looked pretty. “I love it that you brought me a sandwich,” she said. She unwrapped it, reverently, and studied it a moment and then looked up at him with her eyes brimming.
“It’s squashed, though,” he said.
“I don’t care if it’s squashed! I love it that you thought about me while you were away at work. Oh, Junior, I’ve been so lonely all these years! You don’t know how lonely I’ve been. I’ve been so all, all alone all this time!”