The Given Day (Coughlin 1)

"She's pretty," Luther said.

"Tall? Short?"

"She kinda small," Luther said. "Like you."

"I'm small, am I?" She gave Luther a look over her shoulder, one hand holding the peeler, and Luther, as he had before, got the sense of the volcanic from her in the most innocent of moments. He didn't know too many other white women and no Irishwomen, but he'd long had the feeling that Nora was a woman worth treading very carefully around.

"You ain't big," he said.

She looked over at him for a long time. "We've been acquainted for months, Mr. Laurence, and it occurred to me at the factory today that I know next to nothing, I do, about you."

Luther chuckled. "Pot calling the kettle black if ever I did hear it." "You've some meaning you're keeping to yourself over there?" "Me?" Luther shook his head. "I know you're from Ireland but not where exactly."

"Do you know Ireland?"

"Not a whit."

"Then what difference would it make?"

"I know you came here five years ago. I know you are courting Mr. Connor but don't seem to think about it much. I--"

"Excuse me, boy?"

Luther had discovered that when the Irish said "boy" to a colored man it didn't mean what it meant when a white American said it. He chuckled again. "Hit a nerve there, I did, lass?"

Nora laughed. She held the back of her wet hand to her lips, the peeler sticking out. "Do that again."

"What?"

"The brogue, the brogue."

"Ah, sure, I don't know what you're on about."

She leaned against the side of the sink and stared at him. "That is Eddie McKenna's voice, right down to the timbre itself, it 'tis."

Luther shrugged. "Not bad, uh?"

Nora's face sobered. "Don't ever let him hear you do that." "You think I'm out my mind?"

She placed the peeler on the counter. "You miss her. I can see it in your eyes."

"I miss her."

"What's her name?"

Luther shook his head. "I'd just as soon hold on to that for the moment, Miss O'Shea."

Nora wiped her hands on her apron. "What're you running from, Luther?"

"What're you?"

She smiled and her eyes sparkled again but this time from the wet in them. "Danny."

He nodded. "I seen that. Something else, though, too. Something further back."

She turned back to the sink, lifted out the pot filled with water and potatoes. She carried it to the sink. "Ah, we're an interesting pair, Mr. Laurence. Are we not? All our intuition used for others, never ourselves."

"Lotta good it does us, then," Luther said.

She said that?" Danny said from the phone in his rooming house. "She was running from me?" "She did." Luther sat at the phone table in the Giddreauxs' foyer. "She say it like she was tired of running?"

"No," Luther said. "She said it like she was right used to it." "Oh."

"Sorry."

"No. Thanks, really. Eddie come at you yet?"

"He let me know he's on his way. Not how or what yet, though." "Okay. Well, when he does . . ."

"I'll let you know."

"What do you think of her?"

"Nora?"

"Yeah."

"I think she's too much woman for you."

Danny's laugh was a booming thing. Could make you feel like a bomb went off at your feet. "You do, uh?"

"Just an opinion." " 'Night, Luther." " 'Night, Danny."

One of Nora's secrets was that she smoked. Luther had caught her at it early in his time at the Coughlin house, and it had since become their habit to sneak out for one together while Mrs. Ellen Coughlin prepared herself for dinner in the bathroom but long before Mr. Connor or Captain Coughlin had returned from work.

One of those times, on a high- sun-deep- chill afternoon, Luther asked her about Danny again.

"What of him?"

"You said you were running from him."

"I did?"

"Yeah."

"I was sober?"

"In the kitchen that time."

"Ah." She shrugged and exhaled at the same time, her cigarette held up in front of her face. "Well, maybe he ran from me."

"Oh?"

Her eyes flashed, that danger you sensed in her getting closer to the surface. "You want to know something about your friend Aiden? Something you'd never guess?"

Luther knew it was one of those times silence was your best friend.

Nora blew out another stream of smoke, this one coming out fast and bitter. "He seems very much the rebel, yeah? Very inde pendent and free-thinking, he does, yeah?" She shook her head, took another hard drag off her cigarette. "He's not. In the end, he's not a'tall." She looked at Luther, a smile forcing its way onto her face. "In the end, he couldn't live with my past, that past you're so curious about. He wanted to be, I believe the word was, 'respectable.' And I, sure, I couldn't give him that."

"But Mr. Connor, he don't strike me as the type who--"

She shook her head repeatedly. "Mr. Connor knows nothing of my past. Only Danny. And look how the knowledge tossed us in the fi re." She gave him another tight smile and stubbed out her cigarette with her toe. She lifted the dead butt off the frozen porch and placed it in the pocket of her apron. "Are we done with the questions for the day, Mr. Laurence?"

He nodded.

"What's her name?" she said.

He met her gaze. "Lila."

"Lila," she said, her voice softening. "A fine name, that."

Luther and Clayton Tomes were doing structural demolition in the Shawmut Avenue building on a Saturday so cold they could see their breath. Even so, the demo was such hard work--crowbar and sledgehammer work--that within the first hour they'd stripped down to their undershirts.

Close to noon, they took a break and ate the sandwiches Mrs. Giddreaux had prepared for them and drank a couple beers.

"After this," Clayton said, "we--what?--patch up that subfl ooring?"

Luther nodded and lit a cigarette, blew out the smoke in a long, weary exhale. "Next week, week after, we can run the electrical up back of them walls, maybe get around to some of them pipes you so excited about."

"Shit." Clayton shook his head and let out a loud yawn. "All this work for nothing but a higher ideal? Place for us in Nigger Heaven, sure."