“Me, I’m ninety years old and you think I’m always look like this.” She spread her arms and bobbed her head to glance at herself. “What you think I looked like at fifty, when my husband was makin’ good money and the boys was out of the house and I had a new car and the wrinkles hadn’t took over my face? What about when I was forty and we’d go dancin’ on Saturday night and the men would watch me and Lawrence moving like hot stuff? What about when I was thirty, with my hair dark like yours, and fat little babies, and how about seventeen, when my skin hadn’t seen no sun and my ears hadn’t heard no babies cry all night, and my eyes hadn’t seen no bills, and Lawrence would look at me like I was cream for his coffee?” Mrs. Fontenot gave Colette a triumphant little smile. “That was when I lived in Bee-wick. They wasn’t no bridge. One day we had a date and the ferry broke its paddle wheel on a log. Lawrence put his clothes in wax paper on his head and swam the t’ousand-foot channel through the eddies so he could dance with me and look at my face.” She put the ladle in the sink and sat down in a kitchen chair, putting her spotted hand on Colette’s. “You think I don’t know nothin’, like love wasn’t around in the old times, like romance ain’t been invented and nobody was good-lookin’. That’s your trouble, baby. You think you the only one knows anything. And anybody in town knows what you don’t know.”

Colette looked at the floor, sensing what was coming. “What’s that?”

“That you throwed out the best boy in Tiger Island. No lie.” She poked Colette’s arm with a bony finger.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Fontenot. I didn’t want to make you mad.” She patted a knobby knee sticking out of the housecoat.

“A t’ousand-foot-wide river he swam for me during high-water time. They’s some that drowned trying it.”

Colette put her face in her hands.

“You got to pay attention when somebody takes a risk for you,” the old woman said, pulling out a pack of Picayunes and lighting one with a box match.

*   *   *

She shared a meal with Mrs. Fontenot, who offered to stay with Matthew for the day. Colette decided to go to Paul’s mother’s and wait. Before she left the house, the phone rang. It was a Coast Guard radio operator saying that the cutter came back in because of engine trouble. The planes were still out, but they couldn’t see much because the clouds were so low.