“Sounds that way,” Noah said.

She took a sip of her coffee, pronounced it tasty by the look of pleasure on her face. Then she asked, “Have you always been a good fisherman?”

“Pretty good, I guess.”

“You like going from place to place?”

“It’s got its drawbacks, but it’s all right,” he said.

“What about the wintertime? You don’t fish much then, do you?”

“Not a lot. I was in Florida last winter, where it’s not so cold. Winter before that I found me a job.”

“What kind of job?”

“It was on a dairy farm. They had a little tenant house on the place, and that’s where I stayed. It was all right.”

“Don’t you miss home? Your friends?”

Noah hesitated in his answer, thought about the friends he had known in his childhood. The memory of them was vague to him. He said, “I been gone a long time.”

“What about your brother?” she asked.

Noah’s look was puzzling.

“You told me you had a brother,” she said.

He remembered the night of the first supper with Eleanor, remembered speaking of his brother. “Yes,” he said.

“What’s his name?”

“Travis.”

“What does he do?”

Noah paused again, not wanting to give the answer, but knowing it would do no good to hide from it. He said in a quiet voice, “He’s in jail.”

“Jail?”

He moved his head in answer.

Eleanor leaned forward at the table. She looked at the coffee, touched the cup with her fingers. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. “What happened?”

“He was with somebody who broke in a house and stole some money,” Noah answered. “It was after our daddy died. He had a hard time with it and got in some bad company.”

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I don’t mean to be personal. I guess I don’t get to talk to a lot of people except Granny, and most of the time that’s like talking to myself. When I find somebody who lets me go on and on, I tend to say too much. One of my sisters calls me a jabbermouth, and I think she’s right.”

“It’s all right,” he told her. “I don’t talk to too many people myself.”

“It’s one of the things I miss most about Boyd being dead,” she said. “Having somebody to talk to, even if he didn’t seem to hear a lot that I said.”

“Some people are that way,” he replied.

“Have you ever been married, Noah?” she asked casually.

He permitted a small smile, shook his head, said, “No.”

“A special girlfriend?”

“No,” he said again.

“Never? Never a girlfriend?”

He thought of a girl named Shelia Benson, who had lived on a farm near his parents’ home. Remembered her prettiness. Dark, tight curls in long hair. Blue-green eyes. Remembered first kissing her in a game the two were playing in her father’s barn on a rain day, when there was no field work to be done. He had been twelve, maybe thirteen. Shelia was older. Two years older, he believed. Also slow in school study, giving them something in common and maybe that was why the first kiss had happened. The kissing had turned to touching and the touching to undressing. In some dreams, he still saw Shelia naked in the dusty light of the barn’s loft, the lean muscles of her body damp with sweat, the dark, curling hair between her legs, the erect nipples of her breasts, colored like the flesh of peaches. Over the years, until Shelia left home at age eighteen, they had met periodically to kiss and touch and undress and play at lovemaking. But they had never been boyfriend and girlfriend. They had been two people—male and female—who had had a secret that was sweet and good and worth keeping, a secret that told itself only in dreams. He had never learned the truth of what had happened to Shelia. There was a vague story that she had found her way to New Orleans and had married a policeman and was happy. He hoped it was so. Hoped their secret mattered to her.