The Next Step in the Dance
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Also by Tim Gautreaux
Praise
Copyright
For Florence and Minos
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank John and Renee Grisham, whose support of the Southern Writer in Residence program at the University of Mississippi enabled me to revise this novel. My wife, Win-borne, and my children, Robert and Tom, deserve credit for their patience and support. For advice on the manuscript, I owe a debt to both Reagan Arthur and Peter Matson. I would also like to thank the National Endowment for the Arts and Southeastern Louisiana University for their support.
One
The electric sign on the roof of Tiger Island Bank showed a temperature of eighty-eight degrees at 9:00 P.M. When Colette got out of the tellers’ meeting, she glanced up at it and frowned. She drove the few blocks to her rent house and parked in the front yard, which smelled of the tall, bitter weeds that made her nose itch. It was the last Wednesday of the month, the night she had to stay late for the bald man from Baton Rouge to come and explain computers to the girls who worked behind the worn marble counters of the old bank. The bald man was tall, with a long neck like a marsh hen, and the only thing she remembered about his talk was his Adam’s apple going up and down like a bony elevator for words. She went into the small wooden house and sat on the sofa, brushing grass seed off her dark panty hose. Her husband had promised a week ago that he would cut the lawn. The phone rang, and it was Aunt Nellie Arnaud calling from her car phone.
“Colette?”
“Yes.” She pictured Aunt Nellie cruising through town in her old white Lincoln, an explosion of bleached hair brushing the roof.
“Paul’s not there, is he?”
She sighed. “Now what?”
“Well, I don’t want to spread gossip.”
Colette straightened her narrow back. “What?”
“I just passed the Silver Bayou Drive-In and saw him and a young woman turning there.”
She made a face, remembering that her aunt did not trust men in general. “You sure?”
“A fact is a fact.”
“It wasn’t his sister, Nan?”
Her aunt laughed long and loud. She had buried three husbands. “Colette,” she keened. “Colette.”