She had turned around once, trying to look at her own rear end, and knew that it was true: She was gaining weight. She thought of a couple of girlfriends from the bank who visited, how they were filling out toward thirty years old, and she suddenly hated the noodles and chili she was forced to eat, the cold cuts, the cheap hot dogs.

When the weather turned briefly cool in November, she still went out early, and when she had to break ice out of the bilge in late December, she still went out over the pot-metal whitecaps to pull up whatever pitiful catch she could. Even when the old fishermen stayed inside their drafty houses and trailers, huddled next to gas heaters smiling with heat, Colette was running her lines. One blustery afternoon she pulled up a trotline that stirred with five-pound catfish on every hook. She used a three-fingered grip on the big fellows the way Abadie had taught her. On the last hook was a small hardhead, and because her hands were cold, she hurried it off the line, but not before it finned her with a poisonous dorsal spike. She pouted at the dark well of blood in her palm. The wound burned all afternoon, and by the next morning her hand was swollen and throbbing. She would not throw away sixty dollars to see the doctor, so instead, she walked to Abadie’s house and showed him the hole.

“What would you do?” she asked, standing in his kitchen.

He put on his glasses and looked. “I’d go to the doc and get a shot, me.”

“No. What did you do in the old days, before you went to a doctor? I know you’ve been finned a hundred times.”

He ran a hand over two days of white whiskers. “Colette. What’s wrong with you, baby? You’ve got enough money to take care of this.” He sat at his little kitchen table, and she took a chair next to him.

“I’ve got to save my money.”

“For what?”

She held her aching hand and looked out the window toward an old chicken, ragged as cotton against the fence. “Someday Matthew and I will get some kind of break. I don’t know what. Something good will come up, and I’ll need my money. You don’t know what it’s like when I’m rocking my baby and wondering how I’m going to afford to send him to school, buy him a bicycle and clothes the other kids won’t laugh at.”

The old man scratched his white head. “Ey, you and Paul.”

Her eyes shifted to his. “What about Paul?”

“He won’t even buy himself a plate lunch down at the Little Palace.”

“He’s not spending his money?”

“Some goes to his mama, but most of it he’s got in the bank.”