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And she flung herself on him, still holding that sandwich, and started sobbing.
After a moment, Junior lifted his arms and hugged her back.
She didn’t find a job, of course. That part of her plan didn’t work out. But her kitchen-sharing plan did. She and Cora Lee got to be friends, and they cooked together in the kitchen while they talked about whatever women talk about, and before long it just made more sense for Junior and Li
And Junior actually did fix up a few things around the house, just because otherwise they would never have gotten done, but he didn’t charge anything or try to get a deal on the rent.
Even after times improved and Junior and Li
By then he had his truck — used, but it was a good one — and he had a few men working for him, and he owned a fine collection of tools that he’d bought from other men here and there who were down on their luck. These were really solid tools, the old-fashioned, beautifully made kind. A saw, for instance, with an oiled wooden handle that was carved with the most delicate and precise etching of a rosemary branch. It was true that the sweat that darkened the handle had not been his forebears’ sweat, but still he felt some personal pride in it. He always took excellent care of his tools. And he always went to lumberyards where he could choose his own lumber board by board. “Now, fellows, I know anything you might take it into your heads to put over on me. Don’t give me anything with dead knots, don’t give me anything warped or moldy …”
“What if I had been married?” he thought to ask Li
“Oh, Junior,” she said. “You would never do that.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Well, for one thing, how would you get six children inside of just five years?”
“No, but, you know what I mean.”
She just smiled.
She acted older than he was, in some ways, and yet in other ways she seemed permanently thirteen — feisty and defiant, and stubbornly opinionated. He was taken aback to see how easily she had severed all co
Oh, the terrible, crushing, breath-stealing burden of people who think they own you!
And if Junior was the wild one, how come it was Li
He was a sharp-boned, narrow-ribbed man, a man without an ounce of fat who had never had much interest in food, but sometimes when he came home from work in the late afternoon and Li
At such moments he would run his mind back through that long-ago trip to the train station, this time doing it differently. Down the dark streets, turn right past the station, turn right again onto Charles Street and drive back to the boardinghouse. Let himself into his room and lock the door behind him. Drop onto his cot. Fall asleep alone.
13
JUNIOR HAD EUGENE take the porch swing down to Tilghman Brothers, an establishment near the waterfront where Whitshank Construction sent customers’ shutters when they were so thick with paint that they resembled half-sucked toffees. Evidently the Tilghman brothers owned a giant vat of some caustic solution that stripped everything to the bare wood. “Tell them we need the swing back in exactly a week,” Junior told Eugene.
“A week from today?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Boss, those fellows can take a month with such things. They don’t like to be hurried.”
“Tell them it’s an emergency. Say we’ll pay extra, if we have to. Moving day is two Sundays from now, and I want the swing hanging by then.”
“Well, I’ll try, boss,” Eugene said.
Junior could see that Eugene was thinking this was an awful lot of fuss for a mere porch swing, but he had the good sense not to say so. Eugene was an experiment — Junior’s first colored employee, hired when the draft had claimed one of the company’s painters. He was working out okay, so far. In fact, last week Junior had hired another.
Li
“Enlist!” he said. “What kind of fool do you take me for?”
He had the feeling sometimes that his life was like a railroad car that had been shunted onto a side track for years — all the wasted, wild years of his youth and the years of the Depression. He was lagging behind; he was ru
When the swing came back it was virgin wood — a miracle. Not the tiniest speck of blue in the least little seam. Junior walked all around it, marveling. “Lord, I hate to think what-all they must have in that vat,” he told Eugene.
Eugene chuckled. “You want I should varnish it?” he asked.
“No,” Junior said, “I’ll do that.”
Eugene shot him a look of surprise, but he didn’t comment.
The two of them carried it out back and set it upside down on a drop cloth, so that Junior could varnish the underside first and give it time to dry before he turned it over. It was a warm May day with no rain in the forecast, so Junior figured he could safely leave it out overnight and come back the next morning to do the rest.