By two o’clock they were through with what they had planned. Mr. Jeansomme had placed forty-watt bulbs in all the house fixtures because that’s what his eyes were used to, he’d said. Paul had bought twenty hundred-watt bulbs, and the last thing they did was to place them in the ceiling fixtures and lamps, washing the house down with light. Then they left at once, walking briskly off the front porch, through the low gate, breathing deeply when they reached the street, as though they had just escaped a building about to burst into flames. Paul put his hand in the small of her back and kept it there while they walked north, made a five-block circuit, and came back to the house from the south. He stayed on the sidewalk while she walked up the steps to a place she’d never been, unlocked the door, and stepped through all the bright rooms. Two minutes later she came out and sat in the swing.

“Colette.”

She looked at him quickly. “It smells good in there. The cleaner, the mop water.” She smiled. “The light.”

He leaned on the picket fence. “Anything else you need me for?”

She looked at him as though she had just then allowed herself to notice things again. “You can go down and make arrangements to take ice at dawn.”

He nodded. “We making pretty good money lately.”

She put her head back and looked at the porch ceiling. “I’ll need some for paint,” she told him. A paper wasp had built a little nest on the porch ceiling fan, and she counted one, two, three insects hanging upside down, tending their house. She thought of something, smiled, and opened her mouth to tell Paul, but when she looked at the fence, he was gone, and she stared down the street at his straight back moving away, words lodged in her open lips like an undelivered kiss.

*   *   *

The next morning the dawn air was a hot blanket of mist. The hoisting machinery and the black enamel on the booms dripped with condensation. Paul read the weather column in the paper, and the little drawing showed some sort of front flying off the plains and sweeping down into Texas and Louisiana. He looked from the back deck of the Saxon while the ice was rumbling into the hold and saw a few cottage-cheese clouds to the south, their sooty bottoms skidding across the sky. Raymond turned his cap around and went below to fire off the engine. Before the diesel was warm, Etienne pulled onto the dock in his souped-up, thundering Impala. Paul’s father looked into the hold, raised an arm to stop the flow of ice, then replaced a hutch cover. They cast off before the sun came over the trees.