Colette went to her and looked down the tunnel of her sunbonnet. She was the last woman in Tiger Island who still wore one. “Thank you, Mrs. Fontenot.”

“You mamma was a nice lady. She taught my two boys what one plus one was.” She pointed at nothing with her short forefinger. “You remember Claude and Ray?”

Colette nodded, thinking about the silent, thin boys who now worked in the oil field. “How are they doing?”

Mrs. Fontenot wagged her bonnet. “Aw, chère, it’s too sad. I’m all by myself in town now. Each of them lost his job and they living up north somewhere. Way up north in Arkansas, one of ’em is. And Alabama. It’s sad when children leave the town where they mamma lives, let me tell you.”

Colette looked back up on the porch and said nothing.

Mrs. Fontenot shook her bonnet and turned toward the street. “How’m I gonna keep my shovels sharp without no boy to run a file on ’em?”

Every half hour someone would come by, spend five minutes or so, then move on like intermittent puffs of wind, relief from her stifling sorrow. A young girl cousin from the next block visited, then a lady from across the street walked over carrying a Tupperware container of potato salad. Family friends from Bayou Oeuf and Sorrel Pass telephoned, and she became worn-out from everyone’s care. Late in the afternoon, when a thunderstorm in the next parish pushed away the heat and weighted the air with the smell of rain, she went out onto the porch again. A short, blocky old man was coming up the street, rocking his shoulders from side to side, his palms facing backward. It was Paul’s grand-père Abadie, looking all of his eighty-five years as he pulled himself up the steps.

“Alors, Monsieur Abadie, tu veux un peu de café?” Colette did not speak much French. It was a politeness for the old man.

He held up a hand and shook his head, sitting in a chair opposite her. “I come down to tell you I’m sorry about Vera,” he said, putting the accent on the last syllable of her mother’s name.

“Thank you,” she said flatly, for the twentieth time that day. She studied the old fisherman. He had not spoken to her ten times in her life.