“Oh, no. He kept his hands cleaner and softer than a baby’s. But he was happy doing stupid things like dancing with women I didn’t like, and reading stupid hundred-year-old manuals until sunrise. He wouldn’t grow up and plan for the future.” She shrugged, as though not understanding her own explanation.

“Where is he?”

“I left him, Daddy.”

“You left him because he was happy,” the old man said, closing his mouth on a luminous potato.

She dropped her fork on her plate. “I left him because I was unhappy,” she said, feeling childish. If her father had been whole of mind, he would have asked if Paul was the source of her unhappiness—but instead he asked again when Paul was coming in, his old mind derailing and bumping along through a pathless field.

*   *   *

Driving home after work one day, Colette counted FOR SALE signs fading in the yards of empty houses. The last oil-field pipe yard had closed up and a local tugboat line had auctioned everything off. Automobile traffic was down so much in Tiger Island that the two traffic signals on River Street were reset as blinking caution lights. She parked down from the hardware and got out in front of City Pawn’s crumbly brick facade. A little glimmer of gold foil caught her eye, and she turned to see Paul’s accordion in the window, its ebony stop knobs gray with dust. It made her angry to see it on public display, like some secret part of her past put out for everyone in town to view. She went in and a cowbell over the door clanked twice. Ray-Ray LeBoeuf sat up behind a glass case full of yellowed Nintendo games.

“Hey, Miss America come to the pawnshop,” he said.

She looked at his hard, bony shoulders and long, thin hair. “You’re Teeny’s big brother that was in jail.”

“That’s right. What can I do you for?”

“That Paul’s buzz box in the window?”

“That’s the one. You want him a anniversary present?” He put his palms down on the glass and looked her over.

“I was just wondering what you were asking for it.”

Ray-Ray touched his thin face. “We askin’ nine hundred.”

Her eyebrows formed little hoops. “For that thing?” she said, too loudly.

“Hey, that ain’t no piece of junk Hohner or a Regal. That old boy in Eunice made that thing from scratch. We paid Paul a bucket of change for it, let me tell you. It’s a piece of art, you know.”

“That?”

“You ever look at the inlay on that thing?”

“No,” she said. “Do you have to keep it in the window?”

He looked at the black accordion. “You scared it’s gonna get sunburn?”

Colette turned for the door and frowned at the copper-plated cowbell. “Never mind.”

“Hey, if you can’t use that, we got some of Paul’s other stuff, too.”