For three days Etienne couldn’t work, so Paul called down his list of friends until he got to Vincent Larousse, a fair wheelman. Some trips, Paul’s father would come along, though the next day he’d have sore shoulders and see spots before his eyes. One time Colette’s uncle Lester volunteered. Paul watched the old insurance salesman warily as he waded into a fresh catch to cull out stingrays and crabs, wearing his antique two-tone wing tips. He was by far the best cook among all of them and wore a red embroidered apron with pride when he stirred his own pot above the little propane stove in the wheelhouse. Gradually the Saxon became a project of relatives and friends. One day Uncle Octave came aboard and the crew had to endure two days of jokes about goats and testicles. Paul’s brother, Larry, came on as wheelman when Vincent got called out on a temporary welding job. Colette’s brother, Mark, came out and complained for two days about the politicians and how they’d turned the state into a wasteland by courting only one industry for fifty years: big oil. Even Grand-père Abadie rode on one trip and cooked, but the heat was too much for him. Paul watched him trying to help with a catch, playing with a crab, trying to grab it and flip it over the side. “Ah, tu veux manger mon doigt?” he asked, teasing the snapping claws. When Paul was eight years old, riding in the cypress skiff, he had heard Abadie ask the same question of a stray crab raising its claws from the muddy bilge. Abadie probably still thought of Paul as a child, someone who needed all the help he could get. The old ones never admit that you grow up, he thought, looking over at Colette’s uncle Lester, short, overweight, dressed in worn polyester pants and a fifties-era fedora. Only Lester’s memory of Colette as a sweet-faced girl-child could bring him into the boiling waters of the Gulf to fold up his arthritic knees and pick out from the shrimp the stinging hardheads and finger-killing oyster fish. Only in a place where people had known them as children could he assemble such a crew.

The fish dock began asking him for crabs, so he saved them in moss-covered hampers and brought in more money that way. Paul wondered when Colette would say to him that they were on their way: that they could keep doing this, or buy another boat, or put a new bottom on this one, and then get married. He didn’t speak to her about it because only she would know when he would prove himself. His illness had taught him that patience pays off, because his strength was coming back, slowly, the way a bone grows.