“Huh?” Mr. Jeansomme’s spectacles were two halos reflecting the streetlight. “Who is it?”

“Colette. You fell asleep. You’d better get in out of this dampness.”

“I guess so,” he said. She knew he would be stiff, so she helped him up. “Did you have a good time at the Gator?”

She pushed the screen to the side with her foot. “No. The crabs were good, but a fight broke out.”

“Ah, Lord. It’s Friday, I guess. How did Paul do?” He ran a hand through his white mop and walked out of her arms and down the hall like a figure in a dream.

“He lost this time,” she called after him as he started up the stairs. Her mother had gone to bed by this time, so there was no one to talk to. She went to the end of the hall and opened a door into a small room showing two walls of narrow windows. It was an old reading porch left over from a time before television. In it was a dark George Steck upright, a relic of her girlhood, when she took piano from the old maid next door, who taught her to play songs no one on earth had ever heard of, music of no style or school, with titles like “Long Fingers Walking Through the Cloud Banks” or “German Salamander Night Waltz.” She sat down and began playing from a book left open on the music rack for over a year.

The first time she had really talked to Paul was when her father had hired him to cut the lawn. She had been practicing piano, hearing in the background the sputtering of their smoky lawn mower and then the cattle-munching sound of grass being pulled by hand along the piers of the house. She finished playing that day and walked to the window, where she looked down on the top of Paul’s head. He was sitting with his jug of ice water between his legs, which were stretched out on the fresh grass clippings. She could tell he had been listening to the music rain down on him from her open window. That first day, when she had gone out to meet him and size him up, he had tried to explain why the lawn mower was burning oil. She pretended to listen, but, like every pretty girl of fifteen, she was interested only in the fact that Paul had muscles, thick dark hair, and wasn’t half-bad-looking. He seemed nice, and clever, though even then there was a kind of denseness to him, a heavy earnestness she could see by watching his eyes. That first day he had explained how a lawn mower worked and she didn’t hear a word. From that point, things had never changed.

She played another page of notes and thought about quitting the bank and moving to New Orleans, breaking loose from all those silver cords of relatives and friends, the gumbos of the aunts, the homemade sausage of the uncles. As long as she stayed in Tiger Island, she would be a little girl in their minds, and Paul would think of her as what? The good dancer? The prettiest girl in town? The hardest hitter when she was angry? She stopped playing and wondered what went on in his mind. What had he been thinking when he’d asked her to marry him?