Besides, a little sprig of curiosity had begun to poke up in his mind. Someone from home. Here in Baltimore!

The fact was, there weren’t a whole lot of people he knew to talk to in Baltimore.

So, “Well,” he said finally. “You be waiting, then.”

“Oh, hurry, Junie!”

“Wait out front. Go out the main door and watch for my car out front.”

“You have a car?”

“Sure,” he said. He tried to sound offhand about it.

He went back upstairs for his jacket. When he came down again, his landlady cracked her parlor door open and poked her head out. She had hair of a peculiar gold color with curls he couldn’t quite understand: each as round and flat as a penny, plastered to her temples. “Everything all right, Mr. Whitshank?” she asked, and Junior said, “Yes, ma’am,” and crossed the foyer in two strides and was gone.

Now, Junior’s belongings back then wouldn’t have filled a decent-size suitcase, but he did own a car of sorts: a 1921 Essex. He’d bought it off another carpenter for thirty-seven dollars when they all lost their jobs at the start of hard times. He’d justified the expenditure on the grounds that a car would help in his hunt for work, and that had turned out to be the case although he hadn’t bargained on its many crotchets and breakdowns. It crossed his mind, as he was coaxing the cold engine to life, that he could have told Linnie to take a streetcar instead. But he knew that would have been beyond her. Streetcars were foreign to her. She’d have bungled it somehow. He couldn’t even picture her making that train trip by herself, because she would have had to transfer in Washington, D.C., he knew, not to mention a whole lot of smaller stations before then.

He lived in the mill district, north of the station — a good distance north, in fact. To go south he cut east to St. Paul and then chugged between the rows of dimly lit houses, leaning forward from time to time to wipe the fog of his breath off the windshield. At length he passed the train station and turned right, onto the paving that crossed in front of its important-looking columns. He spotted Linnie immediately — the only person out there, her white, anxious face swiveling from side to side. But he didn’t stop for her. Without consciously deciding to, he gathered speed and drove on. He took another right onto Charles Street and headed for home, but halfway up the first block he started picturing how her forehead would have smoothed when she caught sight of him, how relieved she would have looked, how experienced and knowing he would have seemed arriving in his red Essex. He circled back around and passed the important columns again, and this time he veered into the pickup lane. Slowing to a stop, he watched as she snatched up her cardboard suitcase and hurried to open the passenger door.

“Did you drive past me once before?” she demanded as soon as she was seated.

Just like that, he lost his advantage.

“I was getting ready for bed,” he said, and his voice came out sounding whiny, somehow. “I’m half asleep.”

She said, “Oh, poor Junie, I’m sorry,” and she leaned across her suitcase to kiss his cheek. Her lips were warm, but she gave off the smell of frost. Also, underneath, another smell, one he associated with home: something like fried bacon. It weighed down his spirits.

But after he started driving, putting the Essex through its gears, he began to feel in control again. “I don’t know why you’re here,” he told her.

“You don’t know why I’m here?” she said.

“And I don’t know where I’m going to take you. I don’t have the money to put you up in a hotel. Unless you have money.”

If she did, she wasn’t letting on. “You’re taking me home with you,” she told him.

“No, I’m not. My landlady only rents to men.”

“You could slip me in, though.”

“What: slip you into my room?”

She nodded.

“Not on your life,” he said.

But he kept driving in the direction of the boardinghouse, because he didn’t know what else to do.

They reached an intersection, and he braked and turned to look at her. Five years, just about, hadn’t changed her in the least; she might still be thirteen. Her face still seemed drawn too tight, as if she didn’t have quite enough skin to go around, and her lips were still thin and colorless. It was as if she had frozen in time the day he left. He didn’t know why he had ever found her attractive. But clearly she couldn’t tell what he was thinking, because she smiled and ducked her chin and looked up at him sideways and said, “I wore those shoes you like so much.”

What shoes could those be? He didn’t remember any shoes. He glanced down at her feet and saw dark, high-heeled pumps with ankle straps, so blocky and oversized that her shins looked as slender as clover stems.

“How did you find out where I was?” he asked her.

She stopped smiling. She straightened and stood her big purse on the tip end of her knees.

“Well,” she said, and she gave a sharp nod. (He’d forgotten how she used to do that. It said, “Down to business.” It said, “Let me handle this.”) “Four days ago was my birthday,” she said. “I’m eighteen years old now.”

“Happy birthday,” he said dully.

“Eighteen, Junie! Legal age!”

“Legal age is twenty-one,” he told her.

“Well, for voting, maybe … and I already had my suitcase packed; I already had my money saved. I earned it picking galax every fall since you left. But I laid low till I was eighteen, so nobody could stop me. Then the day after my birthday, I had Martha Moffat drive me to the Parryville lumberyard and I asked the fellows there if they could say where you’d gone off to.”

“You asked the whole yard?” he said, and she nodded again.

He could just picture how that must have looked.

“And this one fellow, he told me you might could have headed north. He said he remembered you coming in one day, wondering if anyone knew where this carpenter was they called Trouble, on account of his name was Trimble. And they told you Trouble’d gone to Baltimore, so maybe that’s where you went, this fellow said, looking for work. So I got Martha to ride me to Mountain City and I bought a ticket to Baltimore.”

Junior was reminded of those movie cartoons where Bosko or someone steps off a cliff and doesn’t even realize he’s standing on empty space. Had Linnie not grasped the chanciness? He could have moved on years ago. He could be living in Chicago now, or Paris, France.

It seemed to him all at once a kind of failure that he was not; that here he still was, all this time afterward. And that she had somehow known he would be.

“Martha Moffat’s name is Shuford now,” Linnie was saying. “Did you know Martha got married? She married Tommy Shuford, but Mary Moffat’s still single and it’s like to kill her soul, you can tell. She acts mad at Martha all the time about every little thing. But then they never did get along as good as you’d expect.”

“As well,” he said.

“What?”

He gave up.

They were traveling through downtown, with the buildings set cheek to jowl and the streetlights glowing, but Linnie barely glanced out the window. He had thought she would be more impressed.

“When I got off the train in Baltimore,” she said, “I went straight to the public telephone and I looked for you in the book, and when I couldn’t find you I called everybody named Trimble. Or I would have, except Trouble’s first name turned out to be Dean and that came pretty soon in the alphabet. And he said you had looked him up, and he’d told you where you might could find work, but he didn’t know if they’d hired you or not and he couldn’t say where you were living, unless you were still at Mrs. Bess Davies’s where a lot of workingmen board at when they first come north.”

“You should get a job with Pinkerton’s,” Junior said. He wasn’t pleased to hear how easy he’d been to find.