But he was already putting his jacket back on.
Out on the street Linnie was jubilant, hanging on to his arm and chattering away as they walked. She said Cora Lee had offered them half a shelf in the icebox. “The refrigerator,” she corrected herself. “They have a Kelvinator. We could keep our milk there and some cheese, and then when I know her better I’ll ask to use her stove one time. I’ll clean up after myself real good so she lets me use it again, and next thing you know it will be like the kitchen’s our own. I know just how to work it.”
Junior could well believe it.
“Also I’m getting a job,” she said. “I’m finding me one tomorrow.”
“Now, how are you going to do that?” Junior asked. “It’s not like a thousand grown men aren’t pounding these same streets hunting any work they can hustle up.”
“Oh, I’ll find something. Just wait.”
He drew away and walked separate from her. He felt he was caught in strands of taffy: pull her off the fingers of one hand and then she was sticking to the other. But he had to play his cards right, because he needed that room she had got them. Assuming he couldn’t somehow persuade Mrs. Davies to take him back.
Sam and David’s was tiny, with its specials listed in whitewash on the steamy front window. The twenty-cent meatloaf plate included bread and string beans. Junior let Linnie tug him inside. There were four small tables and a counter with six stools; Linnie chose a table although Junior would have felt easier at the counter. The customers at the counter were lone men in work clothes, while those at the tables were couples.
“You don’t have to have the meatloaf,” Linnie told him. “You can get something pricier.”
“Meatloaf will be fine.”
A woman in an apron came out and filled their water glasses, and Linnie beamed up at her and said, “Well, hey there! I am Linnie Mae, and this here is Junior. We’ve just moved into the neighborhood.”
“Is that so,” the woman said. “Well, I am Bertha. Sam’s wife. I bet you’re staying at the Murphys’, aren’t you.”
“Now, how did you know that?”
“Cora Lee stopped by and told me. She was just real tickled she’d found such a nice young couple. I said, ‘Honey, they’re the ones should be tickled.’ There’s no finer people around than Cora Lee and Joe Murphy.”
“I could tell that,” Linnie said. “I could tell straight off. I took one look at that sweet smiling face of hers and I could tell. She’s just like the people back home.”
“We’re all like the people back home,” Bertha said. “We all are the people back home. That’s what Hampden’s made up of.”
“Well, aren’t we lucky, then!”
Junior studied the price list on the wall behind the counter until they were finished talking.
Over the meatloaf, which turned out to taste better than anything he’d eaten in a good long while, Linnie told him she had a plan to lower their room rent. “You will keep your eyes open for some little thing that needs fixing,” she said. “Some loose board or saggy hinge or something. You’ll ask Cora Lee if it would be all right if you saw to it. Don’t mention money or nothing.”
“Anything,” he said.
She clamped her mouth shut.
“You’ve got to stop talking so country if you want to fit in here,” he told her.
“Well, and then a few days later you will fix something else. This time don’t ask; just fix it. She’ll hear the hammering and come running. ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ you tell her. ‘I just noticed it and I couldn’t resist.’ Of course she’ll say she doesn’t mind a bit; you can see from that leak in our ceiling that her husband’s not going to do it. Then you’ll say, ‘You know,’ you’ll say, ‘I’ve been thinking. Seems to me you want someone around to keep this house repaired, and it’s occurred to me that we might could work something out.’ ”
“Linnie, I think they need the cash,” he told her.
“Cash?”
“They’d rather let the house fall apart and go on eating, is what I’m saying.”
“Well, how could that be? They still need a roof over their heads! They still need a roof that doesn’t leak.”
“Tell me: are people not having hard times in Yancey County?” Junior asked.
“Well, sure they’re having hard times! Half the stores are closed and everyone’s out of work.”
“Then why don’t you understand about the Murphys? They’re probably one payment away from losing their house to the bank.”