* * *

The sun was coming out of a brake of second-growth cypress behind his rent house at the edge of town when Paul turned his pickup into the shell driveway. Colette’s car was gone. On the front porch was everything he owned, his coveralls, his boom box and shoe box full of tapes, his suitcases, shotgun, La-Z-Boy recliner, everything stacked in a neat pyramid with his Acadian ten-button accordion at the peak. He stepped up on the little porch and walked slowly around the pile, going in to use the phone. He found her at her mother’s.

“Colette, I’m sorry.”

“Me, too. I’m sorry it took me over a year to see I was wasting my time with you.” She didn’t sound angry, and that scared him. She sounded like her eyes had been opened to fact. He trembled at the tone of her voice.

“Me and the lady wasn’t gonna do anything. You got to believe that. And I know I shouldn’ta done it.”

Her voice snapped like a cap gun. “I want you out of the house. I’m tired of you sitting around not shaving and talking to old winos for hours about machinery and going out and drinking beer and putting two hours a day into that windstorm of an accordion.”

“Baby,” he started.

“I’m not your baby. Every woman I meet tells me she’s seen you dancing with this one or that one. They’re your babies. Not me.”

He looked down at his work shoes. “Is this about money again?”

“No. Maybe. What are you gonna be in ten years?”

“A better machinist.”

“A wife doesn’t want to hear that, Paul.” He heard an unexpected sigh on the other end of the line. “Don’t you have any dreams?”

He thought about this a minute. “To be the best machinist in the world?”

It went this way for a quarter hour, and when they finished, he went out onto the porch, grabbed a box of underwear, and walked toward his truck.

Holding the box, he leaned his back against the hood and looked at the peeling green house, at the vine of poison oak rooting up the porch’s corner post, at the brown lizards sunning on the screens. Already it seemed a place out of his past, and he wondered how things had begun to fall apart for them. He knew that Colette had been unhappy for months, and he suspected it had to do with her tiny salary. Every two weeks, she’d open her pay envelope and bite her lip at the deductions. Sometimes she gave him a little speech about the lard-ass men in the bank who earned twice as much while getting half as much work done as the women. She’d also said that it made her feel bad when he danced with other girls, but he didn’t understand this. For him, dancing wasn’t a hustle; it was a hobby.