Odessa Arceneaux had driven a school bus for twenty-nine years, and in twenty-nine years she had never once been late, so she was not going to be late to the bank.
She was up at four-forty, the way her body still insisted on even three years after retirement.
She made coffee in the dented aluminum pot that had been her mother's, and she drank it standing at the kitchen window, watching the dark go gray over the roofs of North Lake Charles. From her window she could count the blue tarps.
Eleven, if she counted the one on the Simiens' carport, which she did, because a carport was a roof when it was the only place your truck could sit out of the rain. Six years after Laura and Delta had come through back to back, six weeks apart, like a fist and then the other fist, there were still eleven blue tarps visible from one kitchen window on Opelousas Street. She had counted them every morning for a month now. It had become a kind of prayer, or a kind of arithmetic. She was not sure there was a difference anymore.
On the table behind her lay a manila envelope, a pair of reading glasses, and a single deposit slip from Gulf Coast Heritage Bank, filled out in blue ink in the square, upright hand she had learned at Sacred Heart in 1968 from a nun who rapped knuckles for loops that leaned. She had filled it out the night before, then filled out a second one when she decided the first looked shaky, then torn up the first one and put it down the garbage disposal, because she had been raised to believe that a number like that should not sit in a kitchen trash can where anybody might see it.
She dressed in what she thought of as her funeral-and-courthouse clothes: the navy skirt suit she had bought at Dillard's for Lucien's service, low heels, a white blouse with a small round collar. She put on lipstick, and then she looked at herself in the bathroom mirror and wiped half of it off, because it was a Tuesday morning and she was sixty-seven years old and she was going to a bank, not a cotillion.
"Well," she said to the photograph on the dresser. "Here we go."
Lucien did not answer. He never had, in the photograph. He was grinning in it, squinting into sun, holding up a redfish nearly as long as his arm, standing in the bow of the old aluminum flatboat out on the family marsh in Cameron Parish. His cap said Arceneaux Welding, which had been a business for eleven years and a hobby for twenty more. He had been dead four years in December. She still talked to him every morning, and she still made too much coffee.