Junior gave up and faced forward again.
The longest she’d ever stopped looking at him was when she wanted to have a baby and he didn’t. She’d wanted one for several years and he had kept putting her off—not enough money, not the right time—and she had accepted it, for a while. Then finally he had said, “Linnie Mae, the plain truth is I don’t ever want children.” She had been stunned. She had cried; she had argued; she had claimed he only felt that way on account of what had happened with his mother. (His mother had died in childbirth, taking the baby with her. But that had nothing to do with it. Really! He had long ago put that behind him.) And then by and by, Linnie had just seemed to stop savoring the sight of him. He had to admit that he had felt the lack. He’d always known, even without her saying so, that she found him handsome. Not that he cared about such things! But still, he had been conscious of it, and now something was missing.
He had been the one to give in, that time. He had lasted about a week. Then he’d said, “Listen. If we were to have children …” and the sudden, alerted sweep of her eyes across his face had made him feel the way a parched plant must feel when it’s finally given water.
Over supper he talked to Merrick and Redcliffe about how they would have their own rooms now. Redcliffe was busy squeezing the skins off his lima beans, but Merrick said, “I can’t wait. I hate sharing my room! Redcliffe smells like pee every morning.”
“Be nice, now,” Linnie Mae told her. “You used to smell like pee, too.”
“I never!”
“You did when you were a baby.”
“Redcliffe is a baby!” Merrick teased Redcliffe in a singsong.
Redcliffe popped another lima bean.
“Who wants ice cream?” Junior asked.
Merrick said, “I do!” and Redcliffe said, “I do!”
“Linnie Mae?” Junior asked.
“That would be nice,” Linnie Mae said.
But she was turned in Redcliffe’s direction now, wiping lima-bean skins off his fingers.
It was their custom to listen to the radio together after the children had gone to bed—Linnie sewing or mending, Junior reviewing the next day’s work plan. But the living room was a jumble now, and the radio was packed in a carton. Linnie said, “I guess maybe I’ll head off to bed myself,” and Junior said, “I’ll be up in a minute.”
He spent a while packing his business papers for the move, and then he turned out the lights and went upstairs. Linnie had her nightgown on but she was still puttering around the bedroom, putting the items on top of the bureau into drawers. She said, “Are you going to need the alarm clock?”
“Naw, I’m bound to wake on my own,” he said.
He stripped to his underthings and hung his shirt and overalls on the hooks inside the closet door, although as a rule he would have just slung them onto the chair since he’d be wearing them tomorrow. “Our last night in this house, Linnie Mae,” he said.
“Mm-hmm.”
She folded the bureau scarf and laid it in the top drawer.
“Our last night in this bed, even.”
She crossed to the closet and gathered a handful of empty hangers.
“But I can still visit you in your new bed,” he said, and he gave her rear end a playful tap as she walked past him.
She made a subtle sort of tucking-in move that caused his tap to glance off of her, and she bent to fit the hangers into the bureau drawer.
“Junior,” she said, “tell me the truth: where did that burglar’s kit come from?”
“Burglar’s kit? What burglar’s kit?”
“The one in Mrs. Brill’s sunroom. You know the one I mean.”
“I don’t have the slightest idea,” he said.
He got into bed and pulled the covers up, turned his face to the wall and closed his eyes. He heard Linnie cross to the closet again and scrape another collection of hangers along the rod. Outside the open window a car passed—an older model, from the putt-putt sound of it—and somebody’s dog started barking.
A few minutes later he heard her pad toward the bed, and he felt her settling onto her side of it. She lay down and then turned away from him; he felt the slight tug of the covers. The lamp on her nightstand clicked off.