Paul turned for the door. “You the same as me, just not lucky.”

“Hey, where the hell do you come from with your funny accent and noble attitudes? What’d you leave Louisiana for, anyway? Just to make my life miserable?”

“No,” he said, “to make my life miserable.”

“Oh yeah? Well, read the newspapers. The oil and gas industry is going in the toilet and they’re laying off in droves down there. You better make sure you value the job you got here, jack. You can’t make money down on the old bayou anymore.” He pulled a rubber stamp from his desk and slammed it down on the blue form. “Wu’s boiler is going to the junkyard.”

“Maybe,” Paul said as he closed the door behind him.

Chapter Eight

Eight

After Christmas Colette was promoted at her bank, her office moved down the hall to a private suite of walnut-paneled rooms next to Dirk, who began to bother her for luncheon dates. In the afternoons, he would slide into her office, sit on her desk, look down on her, and talk, while from her chair she examined his caps and bridgework. Dirk confessed that he was the bank gossip, that he knew “who was doing whom.” Colette asked if he knew about anything other than sex and money and he laughed loudly, showing two caps and a Maryland bridge.

In the evenings she began to cook for herself, making shrimp gumbo, sometimes white beans and pork roast, eating her one serving and freezing the rest. She invited Elise over, but she would eat only salads and dried fruit. Colette missed people to eat with and discovered that eating alone was only half a meal. She would stare at a bowl of gumbo and remember her brother, mother, and father gathered with her in the old high-ceiled kitchen back home with the square plastic clock nailed to the wall over the iron sink, its plastic hands slicing thin circles off their lives. She thought of her little Formica kitchen in the rent house she shared with Paul, how even there they had company once a week, talking through steam rising from the food.

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