She scoured the mud flat and found cans to set up, backing off a hundred feet and aiming for the rims, sending each target into an acrobatic spin. She fired and set up cans until she ran out of shells and the ground around her was jeweled with spent casings. Back at the house, she did not start cooking supper’s plain beans until she had cleaned and oiled the rifle. And late that night she sat on the porch in the cool air and listened to the bridge tender blow a come-ahead signal for a tug, wondering if Paul still had his sensitive ears, if he could at least still listen to the voices of machines he couldn’t work on anymore.

*   *   *

The next morning she made a few phone calls, the last one going to Paul. “Can you walk over here?”

“Aw,” he said, then a long pause. “I don’t think so.”

“You got to keep yourself exercised, fool.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Then he said nothing, and that silence came on her like a great weight.

“Then I’m coming over,” she said.

“Here?”

“Yes.”

“I need a bath. Don’t come over.”

“I’m not going to get close,” she said stiffly. She hung up, checked on her father, who was watching a soap opera, picked up the baby, and began walking.

He was sitting on the peeling porch when she came up, and he did not look good, physically or otherwise. Colette thought her mother would say that a lot was missing from his eyes. His skin was yellow, his cheeks puffy, and he lay back in a wicker chair like a limp house plant. She knew what was wrong; she could see it in the angle of his arms and legs. She believed he needed to be put to work. She handed him the baby, and he kissed him on top of his head while he regarded him suspiciously, but did not cry. Matthew settled in the crook of his arm and looked at his mother.

“I came over here because I’m starving to death, and I know you can work.”

He regarded her over the baby’s dark fuzz. “Me and my folks are living on government cheese, and you’re gonna ask me for alimony and child support?” He put a hand up and let it fall.

She looked around at all the failing paint on the porch. “That’s not what I mean.”

“What, then?”

She took a long breath, as if sliding underwater. “Who will loan us a good skiff?”

He tilted his head to the side. “Crawfishing’s hard work. You think I’m up to it? I can’t hardly climb out of a bathtub.”

She shook her dark hair, which was beginning to frizz in the humidity. “I wasn’t thinking of crawfish. I can’t afford the traps and bait.”

“What you need a skiff for, then?”

“Nutria.”