“Was living there different from here?”

“Well, they had mountains. You could see stuff far off, not like down here, where everything’s flat as a lawyer’s ass. You’d get up in the morning and the grass would be dry. Even on a hot day, the walls wouldn’t sweat, and hot was about eighty. The streets in that town went up and down like a washboard and on the sides of the mountains you could see real rock, not just sand and mud like here. The only rock we got in town’s that gravel on the railroad track.”

Paul closed his eyes, trying to picture what a real mountain looked like. “Could you have lived there?”

His father touched his chin. “I don’t know, T-Bub. Maybe if I had some family around. Family was more important them days than it is now. But the damn food couldn’t be eat, and everybody talked that twangy twang, so you couldn’t understand half what they said.”

Paul looked out to the wine-colored rust on the shed roof. “I wonder if I could live somewhere else, like Colette’s doing.”

His father crossed his legs and took a deep breath. “Some people are like birds and can live wherever they light.” He put his head back and closed his eyes. “Some people.”

* * *

Colette’s parents were waiting for him after Sunday Mass. They seemed to have gotten grayer since he had seen them at the train station two months before. Mrs. Jeansomme was fifty-eight, her husband nine years past that, and this cloudy morning they seemed like old birds on a wire waiting out a drizzle. Mr. Jeansomme was just beginning to be senile, he’d heard, now and then putting on his wristwatch upside down, getting lost coming back from Communion.

“Paul,” Mrs. Jeansomme began, “have you heard from Colette?”

He shook his head. “I don’t guess she feels like writing to me yet. And you?”

She glanced at her husband. “Not much. She’s got to be busy.” She grabbed Paul’s arm and gave it a squeeze, then herded her husband toward the street. Their son, Mark, came up and slapped Paul on the back.

“Paul.”

“Big M. How you doing?”

“Okay. You heard from the ice woman?” Mark was a tall, friendly man with the olive skin of a heavy smoker.

“Not a snowflake.”

“Well, I can see that, considering who she’s not writing to. But what’s sad is she’s not calling home. Momma doesn’t deserve that.” He banged Paul on the shoulder with a fist and walked backward toward the street. “Later. I got to drive them home so Daddy won’t roll into a ditch.”

“Wait.” Paul raised his hand the way someone might flag a taxi. Mark stopped and squinted at him. “Did you ever figure why she left town?”

“She doesn’t like the looks of the place anymore, T-Bub. It’s the town as much as it’s you, you dancin’ fool.” He waved and got into his father’s faded Chrysler.

Later Paul sat on the squeaky bed in his room, looking out the window. Next door old lady Fontenot hacked at her garden, mixing in a wheelbarrow of manure with the dark soil. He could not see her face, but he knew it was a nest of wrinkles, her eyes two sharp dots at the end of the tunnel of her sunbonnet. She was singing something in French, the notes jerky with the work of her hoe. He had never paid much attention to her, but Colette said it was stupid for a ninety-year-old woman to kill herself in a garden for vegetables she could walk to the store and buy. He stared at old lady Fontenot, trying to figure if she was one of the ugly reasons Colette had left.