Страница 73 из 79
Saturday was the day he went around giving estimates; that was when the husbands were home. So he didn’t stop by the new house. He wrapped up his appointments early, because tomorrow they were moving and there was still some packing to do. He got home about three o’clock and walked on through to the kitchen, where he found Li
“Oh, good. Could you reach down that platter from up top of the icebox? I clean forgot about it! I like to walked off and left it.”
He reached for the platter on the refrigerator and placed it on the counter. “I’ve half a mind to take another load to the house before it gets dark,” he told her. “It would make things that much easier in the morning.”
“Oh, don’t do that. You’ll wear yourself out. Wait for tomorrow when Dodd and them get here.”
“I wouldn’t take the heavy stuff. Just a few boxes and such.”
She didn’t answer. He wished she would get her head out of the orange crate and look at him, but she was all hustle-bustle, so after a minute he left her.
In the living room, the children were piling up empty cartons to build something. Or Merrick was. Redcliffe was still too little to have any plan in mind, but he was thrilled that Merrick was playing with him and he staggered around happily, dragging boxes wherever she told him to. The rug had been rolled up for the move and it gave them an expanse of bare floorboards. “Look at our castle, Daddy,” Merrick said, and Junior said, “Very nice,” and went on back to the bedroom to change out of his good clothes. He always wore his suit when he was giving estimates.
When he returned to the kitchen, Li
“That’s a shame,” Li
“No, she was just going along with it. ‘Oh,’ she said, all sad and mournful, each time he crossed something off.”
He waited for Li
Li
He couldn’t think of any reason she would be mad at this moment, though. He was the one who should be mad — and was mad. Still, he hated this feeling of uncertainty. He walked over to stand squarely in front of her, with only the Duz carton between them, and he said, “Would you like to eat at the diner tonight?”
They seldom ate at the diner. It had to be a special occasion. But Li
“You did?” he said. “How come?”
“Oh, Doris was keeping the children so I could get some packing done, and I just thought, ‘Why don’t I visit the new house on my own?’ You know I’ve never done that. So I packed up two bags of food and I caught the streetcar over.”
“We could have put the food on the truck tomorrow,” Junior said. His mind was racing. Had she seen the revarnished swing? She must have. He said, “I don’t know why you thought you had to lug all that by yourself.”
“I just figured I was going anyhow, so I might as well carry something,” she said. “And this way we can have breakfast there tomorrow, out of the way of the men.”
She was focusing on the canister of Bon Ami that she was setting upright in one corner of the carton.
“Well,” he said, “how’d the place look to you?”
“It looked okay,” she said. She fitted a long-handled scrub brush into another corner. “The door sticks, though.”
“Door?”
“The front door.”
So she had definitely gone in through the front. Well, of course she had, walking from the streetcar stop.
He said, “That door doesn’t stick!”
“You push down the thumb latch and it won’t give. For a moment I figured I just hadn’t unlocked it right, but when I pulled the door toward me a little first and then pushed down, it gave.”
“That’s the weather stripping,” Junior said. “It’s got good thick weather stripping, is why it does like that. That door does not stick.”
“Well, it seemed to me like it did.”
“Well, it doesn’t.”
He waited. He almost asked her. He almost came straight out and said, “Did you notice the swing? Were you surprised to see it back the way it was? Don’t you have to agree now that it looks better that way?”
But that would be laying himself open, letting her know he cared for her opinion. Or letting her think he cared.
She might tell him the swing looked silly; it was a trying-too-hard copy of a rich person’s swing; he was pretending to be someone he was not.
So all he said was, “You’ll be glad to have that weather stripping when winter comes, believe me.”
Li
Walking to the diner in the twilight, they passed people sitting out on their porches, and everyone — friend or stranger — said “Evening,” or “Nice night.” Li
“Why, of course they will,” Junior said.
He had Redcliffe riding on his shoulders. Merrick scooted ahead of them on her old wooden Kiddie Kar, propelling it with her feet. She was way too big for it now, but they couldn’t buy her a tricycle on account of the rubber shortage.
“That Mrs. Brill,” Li
“She didn’t mean it like it sounded,” Junior said. Then he took two long strides ahead of her and turned so that he was walking backwards, looking into her face. “She probably just meant that our florist might not carry mistletoe, but hers did.”
Li
But her eyes were on old Mr. Early, who was hosing down his steps, and she waved to him and called, “How you doing, Mr. Early?”
Junior gave up and faced forward again.
The longest she’d ever stopped looking at him was when she wanted to have a baby and he didn’t. She’d wanted one for several years and he had kept putting her off — not enough money, not the right time — and she had accepted it, for a while. Then finally he had said, “Li