He found his mother scrambling a hill of eggs, the bottoms of her big arms swaying as she skimmed the spatula around the hot metal. He sat down and braced himself.

“Did you talk to Colette at that station?”

“Not much,” he said patiently.

Her arms continued to tremble above the skillet. “What did she say?”

“She was leaving me. Going to California for a job. You probably know more than I do.”

She gonged the spatula on the skillet. “I always did.” Turning around, she touched his face and made him look at her. “You don’t sound so sad, you. Don’t you want her to come back?”

He shrugged. “She left me. She can do what she wants.”

She shook her head and went back to the stove. “You know, you’re spoiled. You and Colette both.”

“Aw, yeah. We’re millionaires.”

“Don’t get sassy with me, little boy. Just because you’re twenty-four doesn’t mean you can talk to me like that.” She shook the hot spatula in his face. “When I got married, your father was making ninety cents an hour and we barely had electricity. Think of what you have that we didn’t.”

He looked through the screen door into the backyard, then beyond to the grassy rise of the levee three hundred feet away, all but obscured by the fog. Somewhere a boat hooted a deep signal, and he narrowed his eyes, deliberately not thinking of what his parents didn’t have. “I hear the old Gruenwald up by Smoke Bend,” he said.

His mother lifted out a load of egg. “You changed the subject.”

“I’m listening to a boat signal.”

“I’m glad I don’t have ears like yours. I couldn’t sleep any at night, hearing everything for five miles around the way you do.”

After his meal he grabbed his lunch box, walked through the backyard and up the levee, turning south at the top and walking toward LeBlanc’s Machine Shop. His grand-père’s little tin-roofed shotgun house was between his parents’ and his place of work, and the old man was standing in the fog, looking at the river through the willows. “Here’s a early ouisseau,” his grand-père said. “Is this a fog or what?” Paul squeezed the man’s shoulder. “Early again,” said his grand-père. “You must be bucking for a raise.”

“I just wanted to get away from Mamma.”

“Ah. She ask you about the station?” Paul looked downriver into the fog over the levee. He remembered that when Mr. Lodrigue, the station agent, got off work, he went to the Little Palace Bar, which his grand-père visited nearly every night to play cards in the back room. He and Colette were continually reinvented by the imagination of townspeople who knew more about their marriage than they did themselves.

“I don’t have time to stop right now. You ought to get in out of this dampness.”

“Baby, it’s eighty degrees. I don’t live in no air-conditioned house. Why you and your mamma think dampness is going to do something bad to me?”