During October business picked up at Tyler’s plant. Trucks of damp ash began to show up after dark, and she had to stay late to key in the scale records and product routing. She also had to endure the stench of the place, the snarling trucks and forklifts, the noisy, complaining workers who would slam into the office building cursing and stamping a nose-burning blue dust off their boots. The steam plant kept breaking down and Tyler fired a series of three men for not running the boilers correctly. He came into the office one day with the yard foreman, who was drenched in used dry-cleaning fluid. Bucky spiked his hard hat on the floor. She pretended not to notice and kept counting her scale tickets for the week.

“Son of a bitch.”

The other man shook his head as if to clear it. “I told you he didn’t know shit.”

“He killed all the steam.” Bucky waved a freckled arm toward the door. “What we gonna do with all that soppy crap?”

“Put an ad in the New Orleans paper for somebody can run that boiler house, or shut the plant down,” the foreman told him.

Bucky sat down and pushed a hand through his brassy hair. “We’d have to look in a fucking nursing home to find someone old enough to know that setup.”

His foreman ran a finger along the bottom of his mustache. He was another Texan, big, Germanic. “You can always buy a new package boiler for a million dollars.”

Tyler looked through a dusty window as another truckload of wet ash came through the plant gate. Below the window, Colette was counting one more handful of scale tickets in her office, not looking at the slips of paper, but at her boss.

“What’s going on, darlin’?” he called out.

She kept counting, peeling each slip back with a buffed fingernail. “The boiler house. How bad you need a new man?”

“I need him like Custer needed a machine gun.” He got up and stood in her doorway. “You got somebody in mind?”

“You not gonna want to hear this.”

“What?”

She thought of the pawnshop, Paul’s mother’s jewelry under the glass counter. “Paul Thibodeaux has a stationary engineer’s license,” she told him.

“The hell you say,” Bucky hooted.

“That’s right.”

“I’d piss on a live wire before I hired that son of a bitch.”

She snapped a rubber band onto the scale tickets and picked up another pile. “Raise steam yourself.”

The yard foreman tapped Bucky on the shoulder. “If the boiler plant’s not straightened out by tomorrow afternoon, we’ll have to start laying off shifts and putting all that perchloroethylene on the ground. Those people need their trucks.”