Linnie Mae wasn’t the type to shout or sulk or throw things when she was mad about something; she would just stop looking at him. Well, she would look if she had some cause to, but she wouldn’t study him. She would speak pleasantly enough, she would smile, she would act the same as ever, and yet always there seemed to be something else claiming her attention. At such times, he surprised himself by his urgent need of her gaze. All at once he would realize how often she did look at him, how her eyes would linger on him as if she just purely enjoyed the sight of him.
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 Linnie didn’t look at him, even so. She said, “I reckon we’ll have to, because I took everything in the icebox over to the house today.”
“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.”
Linnie fitted a box of soap flakes next to the Bon Ami. After a moment, he left the room.
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.” Linnie said, “I hope the neighbors will say hey to us in the new place.”
“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,” Linnie said. “Remember how she’d talk about ‘my’ grocer and ‘my’ druggist? Like they belonged to her! At Christmastime, when she’d drop off our basket: ‘I got the mistletoe from my florist,’ she’d say, and I’d think, ‘Wouldn’t the florist be surprised to hear he’s yours!’ I surely hope our new neighbors aren’t going to talk like that.”
“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.”
Linnie laughed. “Our florist!” she echoed. “Can you imagine?”
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?”