He looked up at her, his eyes runny and hurt. “I’ll be all right. One of our shippers just sent us a little surprise is all.” He got up slowly and began to show her what the previous bookkeeper had been doing, told her about logging in shipments and billing at the various rates for waste incinerated. “You can turn on the computer and figure out how she ran things. I don’t know a damned thing about those machines.” Just then a tall man covered in yellow dust opened the rear door of the building and yelled for him. Colette was left alone in a paneled closet of an office. Everything was gritty and smelled like a child’s chemistry set. Her typewriter was smudged and twenty years old. The floor was a crusty cement painted gray. She booted the computer, which buzzed and hooted, taking a full minute to light up its screen.

For two weeks she recorded truck shipments and deliveries from the occasional small corroded barge, and when her first paycheck came in, she held it like a cool drink of water. The work hadn’t been bad. However, the business was strange: An occasional bargeload of liquid would come in from Ghana or Italy, and sometimes the whole region smelled like toilet-bowl cleaner for two days, but she got the hang of the record-keeping software, and the hangdog employees treated her well.

At the market on payday, she bought two small sirloins, grilled them, and cooked snap beans and new potatoes. Her father sat at the dark oak table and looked around carefully before beginning to eat, as though trying to remember who was supposed to be there. He smiled and asked about her new job. Sometimes his mind ran straight as a railroad for miles. She would have a real conversation with him, and he would be living in the present. But then his wobbly memory would jump the track, and Colette would be in the room with a younger father, or worse, a stranger looking at her for a moment—nowadays just a moment—seeming to think, Who is this in my house? Who let this person in? But at this meal, at least, he enjoyed his sirloin and nodded as he listened. Then he picked up his white head as if he’d heard a noise and he asked, “Why isn’t Paul home yet?”

Colette straightened her back and put a hand on her jeans. “Paul and I aren’t married anymore,” she told him for the tenth time.

Her father continued chewing carefully. “How did this happen?”

“He never thought of my feelings,” she said. Each time she answered this question, she said something different.

“How do you mean?”

“He has no ambition. Fifty years from now he’ll still be knee-deep in machine oil.”

“He was dirty?” He scooped up a forkful of green beans.