Danny stood. “Change hurts, Eddie, but believe me, it’s coming.”

“It isn’t.”

“It’s got to.”

Eddie shook his head. “There are fights, m’ boy, and there is folly. And I fear you’ll soon learn the difference.”

CHAPTER nineteen

In the kitchen with Nora late of a Tuesday afternoon, Nora just back from her job at the shoe factory, Luther chopping vegetables for the soup, Nora peeling potatoes, when Nora said, “You’ve a girl?”

“Hmm?”

She gave him those pale eyes of hers, the sparkle of them like a flickering match. “You heard what I said. Have you a girl somewhere?”

Luther shook his head. “No, ma’am.”

She laughed.

“What?”

“Sure, you’re lying.”

“Uh? What makes you say that?”

“I can hear it in your voice, I can.”

“Hear what?”

She gave him a throaty laugh. “Love.”

“Just ’cause I love someone don’t mean she’s mine.”

“Now that’s the truest thing you’ve said all week. Just because you love someone doesn’t mean…” She trailed off and went back to humming softly as she peeled the potatoes, the humming a habit of hers Luther was fairly certain she was unaware of.

Luther used the flat of the knife to push the chopped celery off the cutting board and into the pot. He sidestepped Nora to pull some carrots from the colander in the sink and took them back down the counter with him, chopped off their tops before lining them up and slicing them four at a time.

“She pretty?” Nora asked.

“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.”