“I try not to think of you for a bunch of reasons. When you lose something, you got to forget it.”

She put the swing in motion with a little kick. “Even when you wake up with a full bladder in the night, it’s not up?”

“No, I told you. The doctor said he can’t help.”

She leaned into him and slid a hand around his waist. “Look at me.”

He did—at her skin, which was like tan milk nowadays, at her powdery lipstick. He breathed her in. “Why?”

“Because I know you,” she said. “I didn’t before, but I’m beginning to.”

His heart rate rose, and he felt he might be blushing. “Don’t jerk me around, now.”

“Remember the second time I kissed you? In high school?”

“Colette.”

“Close your eyes.” He did, feeling her sweet breath on his face, pouring over his nose and chin, and then something touched his lips like a butterfly’s wingtips dipped in confectioner’s sugar, causing his mouth to open slightly to a hot swipe of tongue. She did it again, and he sat up and opened his eyes wide. He was panting.

“You cured?” she asked.

He threw one leg out in front of him. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

Chapter Eighteen

Eighteen

He stayed up all night working over a yellow tablet, figuring, figuring. He called the whole region the next few days, looking for machinist jobs, but the nearest one was a hundred miles away in New Orleans, downtown, and didn’t pay enough to justify the daily trip over.

A few days later, Colette called and asked if he knew where her father might be. The old man had seemed alert when he got up, so she let him walk to church by himself to say his rosary.

“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.”