“Oh, then you don’t know about his job? I spoke with his mother after Mass and she told me he tested out for a boiler repairman’s license—I think that’s what they call it—and he has a good job already.”

Colette pursed her lips. “He got a good job already?”

“His mother said they need him as a specialist because he knows so much about historic machinery.”

“Well, he didn’t let me know anything about it.” She slapped a thigh.

After hanging up the phone, Colette looked out over the tile rooftops of her neighborhood, then across the river. She kept looking for a long time, as though she might see her husband fixing something in the distance. Her mother had asked her again why she’d moved away, and she’d given the old answer: to see a better part of the world. Well, she found that California was better, but she was not used to the food, and the air made her eyes sting. Most people she’d met were into exercising, collecting, or recreational sex, and as much as she tried to forget it, at heart Colette was still a food-loving, nonmaterialistic Roman Catholic. The air was cool and dry, but poisonous; the highways were smooth and fast, but long; the people were good to look at, healthy and smart, but restless, never satisfied. Most people she had met and spoken with seemed to be waiting for something to happen to them. She looked around her and wondered what she had begun waiting for. More money? Mr. Right?

She put on an expensive pair of running shoes and headed for the street. Jogging was a new sport she’d picked up. She hooked a little can of Mace to her belt, ran down the stairs, and headed north on the sidewalk, a well-maintained sidewalk, unbuckled by tree roots, unswamped by live-oak leaves.

* * *

Paul had found a job with a machine shop and boiler-repair business in Van Nuys, and after cramming for a week in the company library, he had tested out into a position that paid double what he had made at LeBlanc’s. He rented an apartment not far from Colette’s in a nondescript cinder-block building. He decided to get used to Los Angeles, and his first attempt to do so was to locate a place he could eat on a daily basis, as he had in the Little Palace back home. The first time he walked into a restaurant, he asked for a poor boy, and the waitress looked at him as though he had lost his mind. She handed him a menu, which showed no red beans, gumbo, or étouffée. He looked up at the tanned waitress, feeling stupid and alien. He ordered a cup of coffee, then stared through the weak brew to the bottom of the cup, feeling naked without his food.

The next day he was driving on the beach highway south of the city when he saw a gold-lettered sign for a Cajun restaurant. He warily pulled into the parking lot, his appetite hopeful. Inside, he was seated in a dim, crowded dining room under a drooping net that held a few dried starfish, animals he had seen only in pictures. When the waiter brought the menu, Paul opened it and frowned.