She went into the kitchen to make coffee, trying to ignore the pecan limbs sailing around in the backyard. She missed the basket of the dripolator with the first scoop of coffee. As soon as she finished sweeping up the mess, the phone rang. Paul’s mother was crying. She had been on the phone with Nerby’s wife, Zola, since five-thirty. She was so upset that it took Colette ten minutes to calm her down. Finally, Colette hung up and held on to the kitchen counter, wishing there was someone to do the same for her. She finished making the pot of coffee and went up to check on Matthew. A branch hit a gable and she looked out of her father’s bedroom window over the town’s tin roofs to the south, where a thunderstorm sighed in the marshes, its strikes of lightning scarring the mask of sky. She felt the wind lean on the house like a giant’s hand, the screens popping in their frames on the Gulf side. Thunder trembled south of Isle aux Chiens, and Matthew called to her out of a dream. She went in to him as a lightning strike came down half a mile away and the wind rose, banging the porch swing against the wall. Sitting next to the sleeping child, she heard the house’s timbers crack like the ribs in a boat and she started to cry. If she was frightened in a big cypress house on land, then what must it be like for all of them, crashing through the waves in a worm-eaten ghost of a boat?

She prayed for the men, woke up Matthew for breakfast, and then prayed for herself.

At eight o’clock the trees were still loud with wind. The local radio station told again of the batch of disturbed weather in the Gulf. She called the Coast Guard and then Paul’s mother, but there was no news. Three planes and a cutter were running their search patterns, and the Ladies’ Altar Society was saying a rosary in church for the men. Through the morning she tended to Matthew, playing with him until he seemed worn out by her attention and wandered off to plunk the keys on her piano. At a quarter to twelve Mrs. Fontenot showed up on the front porch carrying two pots.

“Come on get these pot,” she said through the screen door, unsmiling under her kerchief. “They hot as hell.” She swept through the house to the kitchen, banged them down on the range, and let out a breath. “Here’s some gumbo and rice. I know you ain’t cooked today.”

Colette stared at the food and thought of her father’s funeral. “Thanks.”

Mrs. Fontenot sniffed. “You got to eat, not worry. What the Coast Guard say?” Her gray head bobbed above the pots as she inspected the controls and tried buttons on the stove.

“They’re still looking.”