“Oh,” Linnie Mae said.
“Nothing’s the same anymore,” he said. “No one’s in any position to cut us a deal. And no one can give you a job. You’ll use up your seven dollars and that will be the end of it, and I can’t afford to support you even if I wanted to. Do you know what’s in my Prince Albert tin? Forty-three dollars. That’s my entire life savings. It used to be a hundred and twenty before things changed. I’ve gone without for years, even in better times—given up smoking, given up drinking, eaten worse than my daddy’s dogs used to eat, and if my stomach felt too hollow I’d walk to the grocery store and buy a pickle from out of the barrel for a penny; a sour dill pickle can really kill a man’s appetite. I was Mrs. Davies’s longest-lasting roomer, and it’s not because I liked fighting five other men for the bathroom; it’s because I had ambitions. I wanted to start my own business. I wanted to build fine houses for people who knew to appreciate them—real slates on the roofs, real tiles on the floors, no more tarpaper and linoleum. I’d have good men under me, say Dodd McDowell and Gary Sherman from Ward Builders, and I’d drive my own truck with my company’s name on the sides. But for that, I’d need customers, and there aren’t any nowadays. Now I see it’s never going to happen.”
“Well, of course it will happen!” Linnie said. “Junior Whitshank! You think I don’t know, but I do: you went all the way through Mountain City High and never made less than an A. And you’ve been carpentering with your daddy since you were just a little thing, and everyone at the lumberyard knew you could answer any question that anybody there asked you. Oh, you’re bound to make it happen!”
“No,” he said, “that’s not the way it works anymore.” And then he said, “You need to go home, Linnie.”
Her lips flew apart. She said, “Home?”
“Have you even finished high school? You haven’t, have you.”
She raised her chin, which was answer enough.
“And your people will be wondering where you are.”
“It’s all the same to me if they’re wondering,” she said. “Anyhow, they don’t care. You know that me and Mama have never gotten along.”
“Still,” he said.
“And Daddy has not spoken to me in the last four years and ten months.”
Junior set his fork down. “What: not a word?” he asked.
“Not a single word. If he needs me to pass the salt, he tells Mama, ‘Get her to pass me the salt.’ ”
“Well, that is just spiteful,” Junior said.
“Oh, Junior, what did you imagine? I’d get caught with a boy in the hay barn and next day they’d all forget? For a while I thought you might come for me. I used to picture how it would happen. You’d pull up in your brother-in-law’s truck as I was walking down Pee Creek Road and ‘Get in,’ you’d tell me. ‘I’m taking you away from here.’ Then I thought maybe you’d send me a letter, with my ticket money inside. I’d have packed up and left in a minute, if you’d done that! It wasn’t only my daddy who didn’t speak to me; not much of anyone did. Even my two brothers acted different around me, and the girls who were nicey-nice at school were just trying to get close, it turned out, so that I’d tell them all the details. I thought when I went on to high school they wouldn’t know about it and I could make a fresh start, but of course they knew, because the kids from grade school who came along with me told them. ‘There’s Linnie Mae Inman,’ they’d say; ‘her and her boyfriend paraded stark nekkid through her brother’s graduation party.’ Because that’s what it had grown into, by then.”
“You act like it was my fault,” he told her. “You’re the one who started it.”
“I won’t say I didn’t. I was bad. But I was in love. I’m still in love! And I know that you are, too.”
He said, “Linnie—”
“Please, Junior,” she said. She was smiling, he didn’t know why, but there were tears in her eyes. “Give me a chance. Can’t you please do that? Don’t let’s talk about it just now; let’s enjoy our supper. Isn’t our supper good? Isn’t the meatloaf delicious?”
He looked down at his plate. “Yes,” he said, “it is.”