“I’ve never been here before,” he said. “Want to show me around?”
She nodded again, and for a moment it seemed that that might be the end of it, but then she rose in a flustered, stumbling way—she’d been sitting on the hem of her dress and it snagged briefly on one of her heels—and walked off beside him, not so much as glancing at the Moffat twins. She was still eating her cookie. Where the churchyard met the graveyard she stopped and switched the cookie to her other hand and licked off her fingers again. Once again he offered his handkerchief, and once again she accepted it. He thought, with some amusement, that this could go on indefinitely, but when she’d finished blotting her fingers she placed her cookie on the handkerchief and then folded the handkerchief carefully, like someone wrapping a package, and gave it to him. He stuffed it in his left pocket and they resumed walking.
If he thought back on that scene now, it seemed to him that every detail of it, every gesture, had shouted “Thirteen!” But he could swear it hadn’t even crossed his mind at the time. He was no cradle robber.
Yet he had to admit that the moment when he’d taken notice of her was the moment she had touched her own breasts. At the time it had seemed seductive, but on second thought he supposed it could be read as merely childish. All she’d been doing, perhaps, was marveling at their brand-new existence.
She walked ahead of him through the cemetery, her skinny ankles wobbling in her high-heeled shoes, and she pointed out her daddy’s parents’ headstones—Jonas Inman and Loretta Carroll Inman. So she was one of the Inmans, a family known for their stuck-up ways. “What’s your first name?” he asked her.
“Linnie Mae,” she said, blushing again.
“Well, I am Junior Whitshank.”
“I know.”
He wondered how she knew, what she might have heard about him.
“Tell me, Linnie Mae,” he said, “can I see inside this church of yours?”
“If you want,” she said.
They turned and left the cemetery behind, crossed the packed-earth yard and climbed the front steps of Whence Cometh My Help. The interior was a single dim room with smoke-darkened walls and a potbellied stove, its few rows of wooden chairs facing a table topped with a doily. They came to a stop just inside the door; there was nothing more to see.
“Have you got religion?” he asked her.
She shrugged and said, “Not so much.”
This caused a little hitch in the flow, because it wasn’t what he’d expected. Evidently she was more complicated than he had guessed. He grinned. “A girl after my own heart,” he said.
She met his gaze directly, all at once. The paleness of her eyes startled him all over again.
“Well, I reckon I should go pay some heed to the gal I came here with,” he said, making a joke of it. “But maybe tomorrow evening I could take you to the picture show.”
“All right,” she said.
“Where exactly do you live?”
“I’ll just meet you at the drugstore,” she said.
“Oh,” he said.
He wondered if she was ashamed to show him to her family. Then he figured the hell with it, and he said, “Seven o’clock?”
“All right.”
They stepped back out into the sunlight, and without another glance she left him on the stoop and made a beeline for the Moffat twins. Who were watching, of course, as keen as two sparrows, their sharp little faces pointing in Junior and Linnie’s direction.
They had been seeing each other three weeks before her age came out. Not that she volunteered it; she just happened to mention one night that her older brother would be graduating tomorrow from eighth grade. “Your older brother?” he asked her.
She didn’t get it, for a moment. She was telling him how her younger brother was smart as a whip but her older brother was not, and he was begging to be allowed to drop out now and not go on to the high school in Mountain City the way their parents were expecting him to. “He’s never been one for the books,” she said. “He likes better to hunt and stuff.”
“How old is he?” Junior asked her.
“What? He’s fourteen.”
“Fourteen,” Junior said.
“Mm-hmm.”
“How old are you?” Junior asked.
She realized, then. She colored. She tried to carry it off, though. She said, “I mean he’s older than my other brother.”
“How old are you?” he said again.
She lifted her chin and said, “I’m thirteen.”
He felt he’d been kicked in the gut.
“Thirteen!” he said. “You’re just a … you’re not but half my age!”
“But I’m an old thirteen,” Linnie said.