“This is the first real letter home and it’ll be a long one,” she told him. “You write someone back home every day. How do I start?”

“Well, first there’s the inside address.”

“Come on.”

“Just do it like a phone call. Like when you call home.”

“It’s not the same.”

“Colette, why are you writing, anyway?”

“I feel enough distance. I can bear to write to them.” She put a palm up to her eyes. “And I know what you’re thinking. They’re the ones doing the bearing, right?”

“Damn straight.”

“You know what’s hardest, though? Reading their letters and finding not one shred of meanness, anything that would cause me pain. Nothing between the lines.” She grabbed a handful of her hair and gathered it into a fist. “I’ve got to be grateful for that.”

“Tell them that in your letter. You know, how much you enjoy what they tell you.”

“What?”

“Maybe they think you left because they weren’t good enough.”

“I don’t want to hear you say that again. You can’t make me feel guilty.”

There was a long breath on the other end of the line. “Other people can’t make you feel guilty.”

Colette bit her lip for a long time. “How do I start this thing?”

“How about ‘I’m sorry I haven’t written sooner’?”

“There you go again.”

“Well, say what you want, then. Tell them you’re not sorry one damn bit you haven’t made them happy with a letter.”

“You don’t have to be mean.”

“Okay. I’ll try. Just tell them how busy you’ve been, then explain what that means. The news will come out while you’re trying to give it. You going to tell them about us?”

She made a face. “Us,” she said, “is still under construction.”

“Later,” he said, hanging up.

She fixed herself a pot of coffee and sat down at the kitchen table to stare at the little tablet on which she had written an address and salutation. “I’m sorry…” she began.

Nine

Early in May Paul was reading the Los Angeles Times and saw an ad for reduced airfares to New Orleans. He bought a ticket over the phone and then for the first time in his life flew on an airplane. From a window seat of the DC-9, he regarded the thrumming engines with great suspicion. His father met him and took him to Tiger Island.

“T-Bub, you won’t believe how everything’s gone down in the little bit of time you been away.” Paul had heard. He watched the traffic and noticed what he didn’t see: pipe trucks carrying oil-well drill column, blue Schlumberger x-ray trucks, red-and-gray Halliburton cement trucks. They rode over a hundred miles, seeing only lumber, dry goods, and mail hauled over the road.

Tiger Island had changed for the worse. The movie house was padlocked and the Silver Bayou Drive-In was overrun with brambles. Only two of the town’s fifteen oil-field businesses were still open. Cut-grass and thistle had taken over the abandoned pipe yards, and slow-stepping herons hunted minnows in the rain-cratered parking lots. “Damn,” Paul said, looking from one side of the highway to the other as they came into town. He found his mother to be a little heavier. She fed him étouffés and gumbos, and he ate like a man who had not seen food for a lifetime.