And so to the late October Monday when as if from a sleep they stood with a cold drizzle against them and the town shriven around them. Workmen on ladders up and down the street unlatching the black or dark-green painted shutters and folding them over the windows and screwing them in place. The train platform a stew, classless now with end-of-season vacationers and fleeing workers all clumped under the sparse awning. Steamer trunks piled in lumps against the duffels and straw or rattan suitcases. The freights going through thoughtless now to the suddenly small town. No one arriving.

They went to the Casino. It was not yet noon. They were the only custom. No one paid attention to them. A pair of men were taking inventory. The floor was mopped under their feet. The room was dark and it grew darker as broad shutters the size of barn doors were laid one by one at long intervals over the windows. They sat huddled at the table, not talking, not bold enough to demand anything from anyone. After a time the barman brought over a pair of glasses and a stoppered half-bottle of something which he left on the table before them without a word. They knew it was without charge. They drank from it slowly. There was nowhere to go and they did not speak of it.

Scully found them there, crossed the room as if he’d known this was where they might be. In a rusted black suit with cuffs and pantlegs too short for him, hollow-chested with stretched thin skin over the bulb of his skull, the lank paste of hair the color of a worn coin, fingers stained with nicotine dangling off the knobs of his wrists, his fingers even in movement composed, as if they alone of his parts knew their competence. He seated himself, a limberjack of angles and lines. A slender ankle hooked up over the other knee.

“I thought you two might yet be around.”

Joey said, “Where’s everybody going off to?”

He shrugged. “Boston. New York. Some go south: Florida, Georgia, North Carolina. Where there’s work.”

“It might be nice,” she said, “to be somewhere warm for the winter.”

Scully nodded. “I’ve done that. You have the train fare?”

Jamie said, “I’m going nowhere. Make my way whatever way there is to make.”

She looked at him, said nothing.

Scully said, looking more at her than Jamie, “There’s ways to winter. It takes two-three things all run together at the same time but it can be done. Sometimes lean, sometimes fat.”

Joey turned her glass in the wet track on the table and looked at Scully. “You’ve heard me sing.”

“Why yes I have,” he said. “That’s the easy part.”