“I don’t know, unless he went back to the shrimp boat.” He heard scuffling noises on the line.

“Never mind, he just dragged up on the porch. What shrimp boat?”

“The other day he got away from me for half a minute and boarded the old boat Serpas’s got snubbed off in the willows below the railroad.”

“Why’s a shrimper tied up there?”

“It’s the old Saxon. Something must be wrong with it.”

“Is it on the bottom or what?”

“No, it’s afloat yet.”

The phone fell silent for half a minute. Then she told him to meet her by the boat the next morning. She wanted to look it over with him. She called Lester Serpas, who had leased the boat three seasons before to old man LaBat. Serpas said the boat was made of cypress planks and was forty years old. It had been good for open-water shrimping out in the Gulf, but he was worried that the bottom was too soft to trust in the deep water any longer. He’d decided to retire the boat and let it sink. “It’s okay yet, but I wouldn’t want to get caught in a big storm with that old boat,” he told her.

Colette called until she had a page full of figures before her: fuel estimates, the price of shrimp, ice, labor, batteries, licenses. She called Paul at home and made him contact Serpas again and question him closely about the engine.

They clambered all over the boat after daylight. Paul watched her poke at boards, bend over and free up the hoist. He had worked on a shrimper a few times as a teenager and remembered only a sore back and cut-up hands.

At lunch they sat down next to the pinball machines in the Little Palace and talked everything out. “It will take all our savings to rig that boat,” she said, “and it might sink if we’re not careful with it.” She took a bite of French bread, chasing mustard off her lip with her thin tongue.

“We can have it pulled up on the ways for two hundred and fifty dollars just for a check. But Serpas had it up two years ago and coated the hull with fiberglass.”

“We can’t afford to pull it out. Do you think it’s too far gone for deepwater work?”

He took a bite and chewed the question again and again. “I checked the bottom from the bilge, and the redneck who works down at the shipyard says it was patched up pretty good last time they had it out of the water.”

They ate on in silence, Colette shifting in her chair, thinking. After a while, she began to cry, putting down her sandwich on its ironstone platter and looking around for a tissue.

Paul slid next to her and gave her a paper napkin from a dispenser. “What’s wrong, babe?”