He parked at the edge of the shell lot, which was giving back the day’s heat. “Hey, babe,” he told his wife.

“Hello,” she said, her eyes unreadable.

“Hey, T-Bub.” Clarisse waved like a parade queen. “That’s a nice shirt you got on.”

“Ah. Clarisse.” He touched her arm and a little smile formed on her lips.

They went inside a long box of a room, plank walls painted with gray deck enamel, a rain-splotched Celotex ceiling. A bar ran the length of the room, at the end of which were two swinging doors to a cavernous dance floor. Three oil-well cementers were at the bar, wearing hard hats and coveralls, arguing over who would buy the next round. One grabbed another’s arm to make a point, and a puff of cement rose into the pearlized light of a beer sign. A horsefly hit the bug zapper over the bar, and the men looked up at the raspy crackle. From the dance floor came the snort of an accordion, the thump of a beer-soaked drumhead, the caroming thud of a bass guitar, the waspy drone of a fiddle, and finally the nasal falsetto of Nelson Orville singing “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” in French.

Paul ordered a round of beer and was trying to tell Colette something when Clarisse stood up and pulled on his hand. “Come on and dance with me.”

He looked at Colette, and she waved them off. They went through the double doors into the blue thunder of the overpopulated dance floor. Bare hardwood tables stacked with beer bottles jammed the walls. Everyone, even the few teenage couples, were jitterbugging, so he dropped his left hand, stuck out his rear, and put his feet in the pattern: three steps left, three steps right, left foot rock back. He did a little push-off jig with her so they could talk. “How mad is Colette with me?” he yelled. He noticed that Clarisse had lost weight, but she was still a little slow in her turns.

“Oh, T-Bub, you don’t want to know.”

He turned her right, rotated under her upraised hand, and slid past her back like an oiled wheel. “Help me out.”

Clarisse shook her head in time to the music and mouthed the words: “Mauvais, mauvais Leroy Brown, le plus mauvais boog dans toute la ville, plus mauvais que vieux King Kong…”

“I got to know where I stand.”

She swung and gave him a smile. “I think you two are blowed up.”

“Aw, come on.”

“That’s no lie. She’s mad about a whole raft of things. She really don’t like the fighting.”

He turned her into his side, then threw her out into a double spin. “I haven’t been in a little fight in months. It’s just playing, anyway.”

Clarisse rolled her eyes. “It gets in the newspaper,” she yelled over the music.

The band ran out of steam and gave up. Paul and Clarisse walked back to their table, past a group of Tonga Bend men wearing tight dark T-shirts, young fishermen who could have been thirty or seventeen. It was hard to tell after a few years in the sun. “What can I do?” He put his hand in the small of her back.