She established her rhythm, baiting traps and lines, running them twice a day, continually repairing the twine, then delivering the catch to Oudry’s for the payoff. When she saw herself actually clearing fifty dollars a day, she made more wire traps, put out more lines. Meanwhile, the last machine shop in that little corner of the oil patch closed up, and Paul despaired of working anywhere. Even though he lay on the floor of the porch and did his prescribed exercises every morning, his strength returned only in tiny amounts. Once a week he kept the baby when Aunt Nellie couldn’t come. On a different day, he would watch Colette’s father, following him around the yard, keeping him from standing in the street. Once a week Colette would come by his house for a few minutes and share with him half of her earnings. She would hand him an envelope, ask him one question about his health, and then leave, the payoff just another beat in her new rhythm. Paul’s mother got a job picking crabmeat at Oudry’s and Paul’s father wandered the town, attending Little League games or bumming a beer down at the Little Palace, anything to keep busy.

When Colette was tempted to buy herself something that was unnecessary, she thought of how many catfish she’d had to fight into the skiff to make what the item cost. In her economy, a cheap blouse might be twenty-eight catfish, a scarf two dozen crabs.

She began to fish much harder and smarter than anyone else. Asking questions, studying tides, moving locations daily, she brought in as much as the middle-aged men who’d fished all their lives. Through the steaming rhythms of August and September, she began to make good money, but the heat was like a hammer on her back. Even though she wore a straw hat, her skin browned like bread dough, and thick pink spots formed on her long fingers where she struggled with the twine. She dressed in loose long-sleeved shirts from the war-surplus store because they held the cooling sweat against her as she hauled up fish under the skin-searing sun. Every night she would shower and in the foxed bathroom mirror look for an expanding matrix of wrinkles forming in the corners of her eyes. She would see how the sun was burning the dark gloss from her hair. The harder she worked, the more she trimmed back her hair, until by the beginning of October the inward turns of her locks rose under her jawbone like iron hooks. She saved money, gave Paul much less than half her earnings, and she told him this the first time she did it.

“It’s okay,” he told her. “You need to buy some new pants.”

“What?” she asked. “What’s wrong with my pants?”

“I don’t see how you can get around in a skiff in them. They’re too tight.”