Colette walked over to the stairs and thought about going up and taking a shower, but if the phone rang, she’d never hear it. She patted her stomach through her slacks and decided to do a few sit-ups. Getting down on the floor, she put her feet under the sofa and exercised until she was winded. She lay on her back listening, and she heard a trawler horn north of town, ascending empty, a disembodied, cold sound. She tried to dream of what it would be like to ride out last night’s storm in a shrimp boat—the rocking hull, the wind, the platinum flash of the bolts. She closed her eyes, listened, and the fine hair on the back of her neck rose up. Why would anyone risk running in such a storm? They must have had warning of some sort. What would force him to stay out longer than he should have? And then the answer occurred to her, and she opened her eyes out of her willed dream and was ashamed.

She got up and straightened the room, stood back and looked at it. Then she went to her piano in the little room at the end of the hall and played out of a generic songbook her mother had ordered through the mail. She dug into the piano bench and took out some of her childhood recital pieces, “Palomino on the Streetcar,” and “Frog in a Shoebox Polka.” She remembered that when Paul was sixteen, he had laughed out loud when he heard her play the last one. Frowning at its deliberately off-time rhythm, she pounded the keys and wondered what he’d thought was so funny about it. Suddenly she was afraid that she knew much less about him than she thought she did. She played the ugly piece again, and then once more, trying to find the laugh, the telephone sympathizing with the final chord.

A man was calling from the Coast Guard station down on the river. She had noticed the squat metal government building hanging over the Chieftan all her life and had never seen anyone come out or go in, though once or twice a year someone ran gale flags up the flagpole when a storm approached, and once a week a crewman started the venerable cutter tied up next to the building or greased the big machine gun bolted to the bow.