She shook her head. “Aunt Nellie watches him during the day. He hardly knows anyone anymore. He’s not who he is.” She straightened up and hit ten strokes on her computer. “I’ll tell Bucky about the sandbags when he gets back.”

“Colette.” He pulled off his slicker cap and twisted it like a washcloth.

“Yeah?”

“When it comes, you gonna let me visit it?”

She kept her face turned to the computer, which further brightened her white skin. “I couldn’t keep you away if I tried, Paul. I’ve got to drive in front of your house every day. You could sit on your porch and see it. You could walk in front of my house and see it on the porch, or in a sitter’s yard.”

“You’ve been thinking about this?”

“I’ve faced the fact that it’s yours as well as mine.” An invoice popped onto the screen and she frowned at it, changing numbers in the little voids. “Part of you is in me, and I’m learning to deal with that.”

He wanted to put a wrench through her computer screen. “You really know how to make a guy feel great.” He fastened his slicker’s top button and twisted it off in his hand.

She looked at him quickly. “I was not put on earth to make you feel great,” she said.

He wanted to say something like “That’s a fact,” but he held back, thinking about what she’d said, about what it meant. He turned for the boiler house, wondering where Colette got her ideas. Was she born with them? Did she get them from those women’s magazines she subscribed to, the ones with the foxlike big-hair gals in low-cut red lamé dresses on the covers, the magazines that tried to make women into world conquerors who raced German cars through life looking like movie goddesses, dressing like millionaires, having better and better sex with every issue?

At the boiler house he checked the gauges and pulled on the injector levers.

“You all right?” Gatlin asked. “You got a funny look on your face.”

“I’m thinking,” Paul said.

Gatlin walked over, pulled off the slicker cap, and looked at him closely. “Damn,” he said.

*   *   *

The next night Colette and Bucky were on her front porch. She was staring over the rail at her car, worrying about a transmission noise she’d heard for the first time that afternoon. Bucky was droning on about an upcoming deal with ordinary sewer sludge. She was trying to be patient with him, but the baby was kicking, patting its foot on her bladder as if keeping time to music.

“If you’re making so much money, how about a raise?”

He had the bright, toothy laugh of an actor, as if he’d been trained to laugh. “All you do is press buttons, baby.”

“Come on. You pay Paul more than you do me. A lot more.”