Page 32 of Junie

Chapter Thirty-Two

Spring burns like a lit match. Junie dices onions under the cookhouse window. Outside, green weeds push their way through red earth. The onion fumes sting, and she squeezes her lids together until her eyes clear, looking outside through the distorted prism of her tears. She breathes in the air from the open window, but it smells of the recently cleaned chamber pots and rotting food. The landscape beyond the window no longer feels like a living thing, but a hollow canvas.

“You got those onions done yet? I need ’em for the headcheese for the master’s hunting hors d’oeuvres,” Auntie says from across the cookhouse.

Junie scoops the onions into a wooden bowl and passes them to Auntie, who nods in reply. Junie sighs. Since New Year’s Eve, no one in her family has spoken to her for anything more than house business, and when they do, the cold edges of their voices sing in unison.

Carefree.

She returns to the onions. She takes her family’s ostracism as penance for her true crime. In the three months since his death, she’d settled on three beliefs about the late Mr. McQueen.

He was a liar, a drunk, and a cheat.

He brutalized and exiled her mother.

He is the reason her sister took her own life.

Even so, Junie can’t forgive herself for killing him.

Her knife slips, nicking her pinky. She yelps as the blood on her fingertip begins to pool.

“Auntie?”

“What do you want?”

“I-I cut my finger. It’s bleeding,” Junie says.

Auntie looks up from her station and rolls her eyes.

“Great day, girl, you can’t be makin’ foolish mistakes like that. Go on around back and wash it off, then come on back here. We got too much to do.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Junie says. She walks around the back of the cookhouse. The pump water runs brown at first, but after a few bursts, it turns clear. She holds her hand underneath the cool water, washing off the blood. The last tally mark burns weakly on her wrist.

“Junie?” a male voice asks, and she turns her head. He hasn’t called her name in months.

Caleb stuffs his hands in his uniform pockets. He keeps his eyes on his feet, his hands behind his back. She bites down on herlip.

Despite how well she hides it, the time since the night McQueen died has done nothing to dull her feelings for Caleb. He had tried to talk to her in the days that followed, but she brushed him off until he finally gave up. Now, Junie smells the fresh grass and tobacco, his scent. It would be so easy to fold into him again, to let him take her into his arms and drown in that smell.

“Bess sent me to say the mistress wants to see you,” he says coldly. “You’re meant to help with the service today.”

“Service?” she asks. She hasn’t set foot in the house since Violet’s wedding. “Why?”

“Be in the house in ten minutes,” he says, before turning back toward the main house.

Junie swallows down her tears. Silence is easier. Talking to him is far more painful.

After making her excuses with Auntie, she digs her old maid’s uniform out from underneath a pile of Muh’s fabrics in the cabin. She thumbs the mended seam, where Muh stitched up the rip from her incident with Mr. McQueen. The fabric itches against her skin as always, and the waist feels as tight as the corset she wore to the ball. She puts on her leather buckle shoes and covers the scars on her head—now faded scratches—with her old bonnet.

—

The back door creaks like a mausoleum gate.

Junie looks from side to side, unsure of what she expects to see after months away. She finds the breakfast room stagnant and unchanged, the table so polished she is certain it hasn’t been used. She checks the linen drawer, finding the usual yellow breakfast tablecloth shoved in the back behind Mrs. McQueen’s old wedding linens.

“What you doing?” Bess asks.

Junie jumps, rattling the wooden drawer.

“Caleb sent me,” Junie says. “Why’s the yellow tablecloth in the back of the drawer?”

“They eat in the formal room now. Master don’t like all the light in here in the morning. You ain’t got to bother with that, anyway. Mistress wants you upstairs.”

Junie’s mouth goes dry. She isn’t ready to speak to Violet.

“Go,” Bess says, nodding toward the stairs with irritation. “She’s waitin’ on you.”

Junie creeps up the stairs, knocking so lightly on the bedroom door that she hopes the mistress won’t hear.

A familiar voice calls.

Violet sits at the vanity in her mother’s former room, tucking pins into her red hair to hold its tight chignon. Her black mourning dress covers her body from neck to ankles. Guilt floods Junie’s body. With Mr. McQueen buried three months before, Southern custom means Violet has another nine months all in black.

“Mrs. Taylor,” Junie says with a curtsy. “Bess told me you needed me.”

Junie folds her hands behind her back. Violet turns from the mirror. Her skin is pallid, made more obvious by the black dress.

“Junie,” she says, forcing a smile across her lips. “Thank you for coming.” Her voice has the cool tone her old governess made her practice when she’d done etiquette lessons. “I’ve been informed that Mr. Taylor has a larger party than I expected coming for the hunting reception. Caleb will tend to the horses when they get back, and I don’t think Bess will be able to take care of a whole party by herself,” she says, turning back toward the mirror to shove another pin into her hair.

“So you want me to help serve the reception?” Junie asks.

“Yes, that would be ideal.”

“Of course, if that’s what you’d like,” Junie says. “I’ll go start—”

“Can’t you stay, Junie?” Violet says, the familiar warmth crackling in her voice.

Junie rolls her lips, wishing she could leave. She wants to say no, but a question from a mistress is a command.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I don’t want it to be like this,” Violet says. She gives up on her hair, and lets half of it fall from her updo and down her shoulder. Her blue eyes are heavy.

“Like what?” Junie asks.

“ This, ” Violet says, gesturing between them. “I know a lot happened last December. But you’re my oldest friend.”

Junie’s nail digs into the cut between her fingers.

“I admit I may have been out of turn about that book at the Taylors’ house. I didn’t need to handle it the way I did. And so you know, I talked to Bea about what she did, too. It ain’t right she put you on the spot like that. She understands now. She was just so scared, you know.”

“I was scared, too,” Junie says.

“I’m sure you were,” Violet says, stiffening her jaw. “We ought to put it behind us. Bess can’t handle the whole house herself—it ain’t her fault, it’s just too much house for one person. Auntie will take care of the cookhouse, and then you can come back and be my maid.”

“Ma’am?” Junie says.

“I’m hopeless without you, Junebug,” Violet says with a laugh. “I ought not to say so, I suppose. But I can’t be a lady of a house, of this house, without you by my side. I mean, just look at the state of my hair. It’s a capital disaster. But I don’t want to make you do something you don’t want to. And I mean it. You have to say you want to come back.”

Junie looks at Violet. The purple circle beneath her eye is hardly covered by talc powder. Even in a high-necked dress, the hollows of her collarbones hang heavy. Being Mrs. Taylor hasn’t suited her.

Junie looks down at her scuffed leather shoes. Her hands burn from the onions and the cut from the knife. She hates cooking, hates the suffocating heat and repetition of preparation even more than she hates cleaning all day. And she hates working in silence with her family, who can barely hide their disgust with her.

But is all of that worse than coming back here, where Junie will at every moment wonder whether Violet will turn back into the girl she’d seen that night in Montgomery? Junie rolls the idea over in her mind. When she strips back the books and the giggling chats, what has her relationship with Violet been? It was cleaning bed linens, folding dresses, and scrubbing dirty chamber pots. Is that what Violet wants for her oldest friend? Does Violet believe she is offering her something good, something desirable?

“Mrs. Taylor—” she starts, her voice wavering.

“Please don’t call me that,” Violet says, her voice pleading. “Just call me Violet again, please. Call me anything but that.”

Junie steadies her voice. This won’t be easy. She stares at a fixed point on the wall, where the sharp edge of the windowsill meets blue wallpaper.

“I appreciate the generous offer and your kind words. But—”

Violet’s eyes widen. She closes them hard and turns back to face the mirror before opening them again.

“You ain’t gotta finish if that is what you choose,” she says, sniffling. She goes back to fixing her hair with the pins.

“After what happened, I think I ought not to be your maid anymore. Maybe it’s best for me to be in the cookhouse.”

“I understand, Junie,” Violet says, eyeing her own reflection. “You ain’t gotta explain more.”

Her back straightens as her jaw stiffens. She pushes back her shoulders and smooths her hair, her expression setting like the mortar in between bricks. Junie holds in a shiver; from this angle, Violet looks just like Mrs. McQueen.

“Regardless of where you work, we need another housemaid. You’ll have to take care of my mother from now on.”

Junie bites her lip. Waiting on Mrs. McQueen could be a fate worse than slicing onions for the rest of her life.

“If that’s what you want. I’ll be on my way downstairs to help with the service, then,” she says, stepping back and exiting.

She leans her back against the wall outside Violet’s door. For a moment she wonders if Violet will come after her, if she’ll chase Junie and make good on her threats, or if she’ll come crying to beg Junie to change her mind.

The door stays closed.