Before long, the band broke out with “Hello, Josephine” and she walked over and asked him to teach her the bob step. He’d given her a slow smile, as though she’d asked for a secret drink of whiskey. “You want to learn some real dancing, huh?” And as though he’d been waiting fifteen years for her to ask him for a lesson, he took just the fingertips of her right hand and showed her the pattern of the dance. She watched his glossy shoes as he taught her to count steps in her head. He told her how to hold her arm stiff when she rocked back on her heel before a spin, and then they practiced turning her right, then left, then a double turn, and finally a behind-the-back pass. She asked the band to play another one with the same beat, and the two of them actually danced this time among their shoulder-jerking friends and two jitterbugging chaperones trying to stay away from each other’s feet. Colette found it easy to move with him. When she turned and looked down, their steps matched; when she put out her hand, it went right into his on the downbeat. They didn’t talk that night, but they did dance.

It was two months before they were out on the floor again, at the Big Gator with his aunts and uncles, where he twisted his Neolite-soled loafers in the cornstarch and fed off the good moves she learned from him. He began hanging around her house, fixing things for her father. Colette admired a boy who could make broken things work again. She wondered what it would be like never to be defeated by the mystical world of machinery: dead hair dryers, buzzing light fixtures, snickering automobiles. He even repaired her music box, realigning a button-sized gear and oiling a hairspring with the tip of a toothpick. She liked his sense of humor, though she seldom laughed because of it. She valued it mostly because it meant he was smart. Smart people eventually went places, her mother told her, and Colette wanted to go places.

She threw the polished loafers into the closet and slammed the door on them, wondering where he was, what he had on his feet. It had to be his work boots. This somehow comforted her. At least he hadn’t been dancing with that person she’d found him with. She grabbed a silky rope of her long black hair. She looked at it and narrowed her eyes, thinking of the blond woman. “She can wash his greasy clothes,” she said aloud, putting a hand over her eyes.

Two

Sometimes Paul Thibodeaux’s judgment was faulty, but he had enough understanding of Colette to make him sleep at his grand-père’s old house on River Street. He told himself before he dozed off in the iron bed in the front room that Colette would cool down, and he could go by the house and smooth things over before she left for work. He was used to her anger, had learned already to endure it, knew that sometimes he deserved the sting of her voice. His wife wanted a better rent house with a paved driveway, not a mud hole dotted with a few clamshells. He would get around to looking in a couple of months, when they’d saved enough.