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By Root 409 0

his eyes, imagining that touch, and then he pictures running his fingers up through her hair and watching the goose bumps rise on her skin. He imagines trailing his hand the length of her bare arm and maybe even following his hand with his mouth. He has imagined all of it, every single day since he first saw Honora coming down the stairs, and he has begun to wonder if there isn’t something wrong with him that he so desires something he can never have. Last week he told Mironson that he had an errand to do, then he walked over to St. André’s and went inside and sat with all the wayward Franco boys and old women and tried to pray for a miracle. But then he shortly realized that any miracle he wanted would have to mean the death or disappearance of Sexton Beecher, and obviously a man couldn’t ask for that from God. So he tried to pray instead to be released from the terrible fist of desire — a desire that he is almost never free of, that takes away his appetite and makes him sleepless in the night — but, of course, he couldn’t do that either, because in truth McDermott doesn’t want to be released. So he gave up altogether and went outside and smoked a cigarette on the church steps and thought he’d probably lost the habit of praying in a church anyway; it made him feel like a fake.

Honora pushes her chair back, stands up, and stretches her arms high over her head, raising her dress an inch above her knees. Mironson throws his shoulders back a couple of times to unkink them. Honora relaxes her arms and turns, one hand on the chair, and sees McDermott standing in the doorway. He can feel her smile all the way down to the soles of his feet.

“Taking a break?” McDermott asks.

“A short one,” Mironson says.

“Are you both hungry?” Honora asks.

“Sure,” McDermott says, though he can hardly get anything down these days.

“Want to help me make some sandwiches?”

“Sure,” he says again, reduced in her presence, it would seem, to one-word answers.

He moves out of the doorway to let her pass. Sometimes they speak for just a minute in a hallway, occasionally for a longer period when she is cooking in the kitchen or has moved out onto the porch. She is easy to talk to, and on good days he is able to convince himself that she is merely a friend, a colleague — a comrade, as Mironson would say. He has talked to her about Alphonse, about Eileen, and about the brothers who used to be a handful. About the farm in Ireland he’s never seen but about which his father spoke incessantly. About the way Ross more or less cornered him into helping to organize the union that now seems to be his life. He talks to Honora while she peels carrots or sets the table or puts away the groceries. Once, he went with her on her sea glass walk and they played a screwy game in which they color coded the people in the house to match the shards of glass. Honora was blue, hands down, McDermott said, and she said then that he was green for Irish. And McDermott said okay, he’d be the bottle green if Alphonse could be the light green, how was that? And Honora said that made sense even if Alphonse was Franco, and McDermott asked what color a Franco would be, and Honora said she had no idea, and McDermott said, “Honorary Irish, then.” But Mahon and Ross were definitely brown, they agreed, and Vivian — no question there — was lavender, and Mironson would be the opaque white, “for his prose,” Honora said, and McDermott laughed. The only man who didn’t get assigned a color was Sexton. “Oh gosh, I don’t know what color Sexton would be,” Honora said, and McDermott thought Sexton most resembled a slimy yellow with brown threads like those from a jellyfish running through it, a thought that made McDermott wince with the realization that he was as jealous as a schoolboy.

“How can I help?” he asks, following Honora into the kitchen.

“Talk to me,” she says as she unwraps a loaf of bread. He watches her walk to the icebox and remove a packet of bologna and another of cheese. “You stopped the press.”

McDermott situates himself so that he can see her mouth. It is, he thinks, the most