“You—you got to go in the morning,” she repeated blankly. Her work had fallen in her lap, and the delicate folds were crumpled between her clutched hands.
He nodded. “I got to go. They drafted me.”
Neither of them spoke for a moment. Julie swallowed spasmodically once or twice, looking around the little room where their imprisoned personalities had come together in the last weeks. Where they had found one another, and in that finding had discovered their hidden selves. Where their souls had ventured forth and found a whole new world impinging marvelously upon their constricted everyday existence, and where the timid and reserved room had taken on life from their life.
“You’re going away?” she faltered again, knowing that this world was falling to pieces. She felt herself beginning to tremble all over.
“I got to go, honey,” he said, and stretched out his hand open to her across the table. It was the first time he had used a term of endearment—the first time he had stretched his hand to her. She put her own swiftly into his. The two hands, small and thin, locked together there upon the table. She did not look at him, she looked down at their clasped hands in the light—hands that had miraculously found each other out of all the tumult and terrors of life. Through the tears that were beginning to burn into her eyes the hands looked dim and uncertain. The trembling of her body ran down her arm into her fingers, and communicated itself to his. A tremor shivered through their hands as they clung together.
“I—I got to go, ain’t I, little honey?”
There was a question in his tone now, and she looked up swiftly into his face, the tears arrested and hanging upon her lashes. In his eyes looking hungrily at her she read hesitation and dread. She forgot herself in the realization of what was before him.
“You’re afraid,” she said abruptly.
His face flared darkly red, and he put his disengaged hand up before his eyes. But in a moment he took it down and looked straight at her.
“Yes, I am,” he said. “Look at me, honey, I don’t mind your knowin’ it. I want for you to know. I want you to know just all I am. You’re the only person in all the world I could ever speak about it to, but I want you to know just the onery little feller I am. You’re my mother, an’ my sister—you’re what I am. I can’t keep nothing back from you. I want to lay my heart right out for you to see.”