“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.

Twice he had long visits with Colette’s parents, explaining how busy she was with her job, how well she was doing, how happy she was. Once, Mr. Jeansomme got up to retrieve a bottle of wine, but he came back five minutes later empty-handed, having forgotten why he had left the room. Mrs. Jeansomme talked about Colette as though she had not left, not filed for a divorce still pending. The three of them pretended it didn’t matter that she was not there.

On his third and last night home, Paul and his father walked down to the Little Palace for a beer, taking the table by the door, under the yellowed Regal beer clock. A crowd of bragging firemen lined the bar, flicking ashes on the shoe-polished cypress floor.

His father scratched an elbow. “T-Bub, it was good to see you. We got your sister and brother here, but you the baby. When you here, your mamma and me don’t feel so old.”

“Let me get used to those damned airplanes, and I’ll come back before too long.”

“Man, I hope I never have to get on one of those things.” His father waved at a cousin. “You better try to get that girl down here pretty quick. Her folks ain’t getting any younger, you know.”

“Since when has anybody been able to tell Colette what to do?” He took a long, cold swallow of Dixie.

His father leaned forward against the table, his shoulders rounding. “Old man Jeansomme ain’t gonna last forever. His mind’s in terrible shape.” He also took a long pull on his beer. “Loisel down at the clinic says Colette’s mamma’s blood pressure is sky-high. You gonna tell that to Colette?”

“If I get a chance to.”

“You make the chance.” He waved to Mr. Lodrigue, the station agent, who was at the bar. “So. You got a pretty good job.” He said this as though it was an accusation.