And it was blue.
Oh, God, an awful blue, a boring, no-account, neither-here-nor-there Swedish blue. It was such a shock that he had a moment when he wondered if he was hallucinating, experiencing some taunting flash of vision from his youth. He gave a kind of moan. He slammed the truck door shut behind him and walked over to the swing. Blue, all right. He bent to set a finger on one armrest and it came away tacky, which was no surprise because up close, he could smell the fresh paint.
He looked around quickly, half sensing he was being watched. Someone was lurking in the shadows and watching him and laughing. But no, he was alone.
He had the key out of his pocket before he realized the back door was already open. “Linnie?” he called. He stepped inside and found Dodd McDowell at the kitchen sink, blotting a paintbrush on a splotched rag.
“What in the hell do you think you’re doing?” Junior asked him.
Dodd spun around.
“Did you paint that swing?” Junior asked him.
“Why, yes, Junior.”
“What for? Who told you you could do that?”
Dodd was a very pale, bald-headed man with whitish-blond eyebrows and lashes, but now he turned a deep red and his eyelids grew so pink that he looked teary. He said, “Linnie did.”
“Linnie!”
“Did you not know about it?”
“Where did you see Linnie?” Junior demanded.
“She called me on the phone last night. Asked if I would pick up a bucket of Swedish-blue high-gloss and paint the porch swing for her. I thought you knew about it.”
“You thought I’d hunt down solid cherry, and pay an arm and a leg for it, and put Eugene to work varnishing it in a shade to look right with the porch floor, and then have you slop blue paint on it.”
“Well, I didn’t know. I figured: women. You know?” And Dodd spread his hands, still holding the brush and the rag.
Junior forced himself to take a deep breath. “Right,” he said. “Women.” He chuckled and shook his head. “What’re you going to do with them? But listen,” he said, and he sobered. “Dodd. From now on, you take your orders from me. Understand?”
“I hear you, Junior. Sorry about that.”
Dodd still looked as if he were about to cry. Junior said, “Well, never mind. It’s fixable. Women!” he said again, and he gave another laugh and then turned and walked back out and shut the door behind him. He just needed a little time to get ahold of himself.
She was the bane of his existence. She was a millstone around his neck. That night back in ’31 when he went to collect her from the train station and found her waiting out front—her unevenly hemmed gray coat too skimpy for the Baltimore winter, her floppy, wide-brimmed felt hat so outdated that even Junior could tell—he’d had the incongruous thought that she was like mold on lumber. You think you’ve scrubbed it off but one day you see it’s crept back again.
He had considered not going to collect her. She had telephoned him at his boardinghouse, and when he heard that confounded “Junie?” (nobody else called him that) in her stringy high voice he’d known instantly who it was and his heart had sunk like a stone. He’d wanted to slam the earpiece onto the hook again. But he was caught. She had his landlady’s phone number. Lord only knew how she’d gotten it.
He said, “What.”
“It’s me! It’s Linnie Mae!”
“What do you want?”
“I’m here in Baltimore, can you believe it? I’m at the railroad station! Could you come pick me up?”
“What for?”
There was the tiniest pause. Then, “What for?” she asked. All the bounce had gone out of her voice. “Please, Junie, I’m scared,” she said. “There’s a whole lot of colored folks here.”
“Colored folks won’t hurt you,” he said. (They didn’t have any colored back home.) “Just pretend you don’t see them.”
“What am I going to do, Junior? How am I going to find you? You have to come and get me.”
No, he did not have to come and get her. She didn’t have the least little claim on him. There was nothing between them. Or there was only the worst experience of his life between them.
But he was already admitting to himself that he couldn’t just leave her there. She’d be as helpless as a baby chick.
Besides, a little sprig of curiosity had begun to poke up in his mind. Someone from home. Here in Baltimore!
The fact was, there weren’t a whole lot of people he knew to talk to in Baltimore.
So, “Well,” he said finally. “You be waiting, then.”
“Oh, hurry, Junie!”
“Wait out front. Go out the main door and watch for my car out front.”
“You have a car?”