He stared down at the weeds, trying to remember the last time she’d laughed out loud. And she could laugh. At their wedding reception down at the Lion’s Club hall, there had been a lounge band, three skiffs up on sawhorses loaded with ice and bottled beer, and two hundred people, but the only thing he remembered plainly was the white arch of Colette’s teeth as she threw her head back and laughed with him. They drank Schlitz and champagne mixed, threw cake at the ugly children from Grand Crapaud, and when it was time for the first dance, they did a barefoot jitterbug so dazzling to the cousins and aunts that they had to put on their shoes and spend the rest of the afternoon dancing with relatives. For a honeymoon, they went to New Orleans and ate for three days in expensive restaurants. In Brennan’s and Gautreau’s, Paul told her how much better she could cook than the city chefs. And this, for the most part, was true. The first meal she made in their rent house was a dark crawfish stew garnished with shallots and translucent slices of hard-boiled egg that he gladly would have driven a hundred miles to buy. Whenever he’d tasted her food, he’d known that she loved him.

The telephone started ringing in the rent house’s living room, and he looked up at the rattling noise. In there on the couch, the second month of their marriage, he had been sick as death with the flu. Colette had tended him better than a hospital nurse, had put a cool white hand on his head and pulled the fever out of him. He remembered that she sat in a chair and watched him that few days, amazed that he could get sick.

She began to look at him a great deal. When he spent a thousand dollars on his little accordion, she stared at his eyes, at his fingers testing the buttons, and she asked him to practice with the squalling thing outside on the porch. He had not thought much of it at the time, but now he remembered the way she started looking at him, as though he were a complicated automobile she had bought and didn’t quite know how to handle. The first time he’d refused to come home early on a Saturday night, she’d given him an angry stare before leaving the dance hall. He tried to remember her dark ball-bearing eyes that night when he did finally come in, tipsy and with Georgette Ledet’s perfume on his shirt. He’d only danced with her, he’d told Colette. “I know that,” she’d said, crossing her arms against him. He’d felt then that they had begun speaking two different languages.

The telephone continued to ring, and the house key in his jeans seemed to heat up, but standing there with his drawers in his hands, he didn’t feel it was his phone anymore, nor his house.

* * *

He took his belongings to his parents’ old place down on River Street, and after three weeks, he was still there. His mother tolerated him as long as he kept his mouth shut about her trips to the Boggy Belle Indian Casino and her Wednesday-night bourrée games. She was a sharp-eyed woman of fifty-five who kept her graying hair permed up in a nest of iron curls. His father, an inventory clerk at an oil-field supply company, was glad to have him around to repair broken screen doors and the leaky, singing faucets, but Paul suspected that when all the ruined and worn-out things around the rambling cypress house were restored, even his father would begin to fret over his son’s unaccountable presence.