She turned her wrinkled face to the window and regarded a patch of angry sky. “Them Coast Guard boys, they not from here.”

Colette picked up the note of doubt in the old woman’s voice and ran with it. The Coast Guard boys were not looking for friends or relatives, after all, just blips on radar or motes swimming in the vast, indifferent Gulf. She sat down hard in a kitchen chair and put her knuckles against her lips. No one will look for you like someone who’s known you all your life. Nothing fosters a rescue like ties in the blood.

“Ey,” Mrs. Fontenot said.

“What?” Colette looked at the old woman’s long coat, the kerchief tied down over her ears.

“You worried about the boat or them men on it?” She pointed toward the door with a ladle.

“The men, of course. If you think I’m that hard-hearted, you been listening too much to Paul.”

The old woman shook her head. “He never said nothing bad about you, baby.”

“I bet.”

“Know what I think?” she asked, putting the ladle into the pot of gumbo and moving it in a circle. “He’d do anything for you.”

Colette stood up quickly and turned off the range. “What he or I would do is none of your business.”

“Oh-ho,” Mrs. Fontenot mocked. “You think this old lady don’t know nothing about romance, hanh? You think T-Bub, who I had in my lap the night he come home from the hospital, ain’t none of my business?” She turned the burner back on and banged the ladle once on the pot, hard.

Colette sat down. “I’m sorry, but how do you know what he feels about me?”