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By Root 402 0

talked to Honora as she counted out the money. A Buick twodoor, he explained. A 1926, only three years old. It was the color of a robin’s egg, he said, with a red stripe just below the door handle. A real beauty, with wood-spoke wheels and navy mohair upholstery. He was getting it for a song, from a widow who’d never learned to drive her husband’s car. He seemed excited in the way that men do when thinking about cars that don’t belong to them yet, that haven’t broken down yet. Honora clipped the bills together and slipped them under the grille. His eyes were gray, set deep beneath heavy brows. He had a trim mustache, a shade darker than his hair. He brushed his hair, flattened some from the hat, from his forehead. She had to wiggle the money under the grille to remind him of it. He took it, folded it once, and slipped it into the pocket of his trousers.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Honora,” she said.

“How do you spell it?”

She spelled it for him. “The H is silent,” she added.

“O-nor-a,” he said, trying it out. “Have you worked here long?”

They were separated by the grille. It seemed an odd way to meet, though better than at McNiven’s, where she sometimes went with Ruth Shaw. There a man would slide into the booth and press his leg against your thigh before he’d even said his name.

“I’m Sexton Beecher,” the handsome face dissected by grill-work said. At the next window, Mrs. Yates was listening intently.

Honora nodded. There was a man behind him now. Harry Knox, in his overalls, holding his passbook. Growing impatient.

Sexton put his hat back on. “I sell typewriters,” he said, answering a question that hadn’t yet been asked. “The courthouse is one of my accounts. I need a car in my job. I used to borrow my boss’s Ford, but the engine went. They said it would cost more to fix it than to buy a new one. Don’t ever buy a Ford.”

It seemed unlikely she would ever buy a Ford.

The courthouse employed at least half of the adults in town. Taft was the county seat, and all the cases went to trial there.

“Enjoy the car,” Honora said.

The man seemed reluctant to turn away. But there was Harry Knox stepping up to the grille, and that was that. Through the window at the side of the bank, Honora caught a glimpse of Sexton Beecher buttoning his coat as he walked away.

Sexton tries the switch on the wall, even though they both know there is no electricity yet. He opens doors off the hallway so that light can enter from other rooms with windows. The floorboards of the hall are cloudy with dust, and on the walls a paper patterned in green coaches and liveried servants is peeling away at the seams. A radiator, once cream colored, is brown now, with dirt collected in the crevices. At the end of the hall is a stairway with an expansive landing halfway up, a wooden crate filled with a fabric that might once have been curtains. The ceilings, pressed tin, are nearly as high as those in public buildings. Honora can see the mildew on the walls then, a pattern competing with the carriages and footmen. The house smells of mold and something else: other people lived here.

She enters a room that seems to be a kitchen. She walks to a shuttered window and lifts the hook with her finger. The shutters open to panes of glass coated with a year or two of salt. A filmy light, like that through blocks of frosted glass, lights up an iron stove, its surface dotted with animal droppings. She twists a lever, and the oven door slams open with a screech and a bang that startle her.

She bends and looks inside. Something dead and gray is in the corner.

She walks around the kitchen, touching the surfaces of shelves, the grime of years in the brush strokes of the paint. A dirty sink, cavernous and porcelain, is stained with rust. She gives the tap a try. She could budge it if she leaned her weight against the sink, but her suit is still on loan from Bette’s Second Time Around. The butter yellow jacket with its long lapels narrows in nicely at the waist and makes a slender silhouette, a change from a decade of boyish dresses with no waists. She shivers