"That's why I said it." His mother put a hand on his knee. "When I heard what happened at the ramp, I thought—Lord, here we go again. Another Pruitt down there putting words on that man's boat. And then I heard you'd gone back. Twice. And then today I heard about Kyle, and what you said to Garrett Vance on his own porch." Her mouth trembled. "Your daddy turned around three times. You didn't turn around."
"I almost did. The first time, I said everything wrong."
"But you went back," said his mother. "That's the whole thing, baby. That's all it ever was. You went back."
* * *
On Saturday morning the white skiff was out of the water, upside down on two sawhorses under the live oak, and Mr. Tran was sanding the stripe.
He did it every spring, Danny explained, before the Blessing of the Fleet. Sand it down, wipe it with thinner, lay on a fresh coat. Forty seasons of green, one on top of the other, so that the stripe had a depth to it you could almost fall into, like looking down into clear water. Danny explained this with the air of someone who has heard a thing so many times it has become part of the furniture, and then he looked at Wade, who had arrived at seven in old jeans with a bag of beignets from the bakery in town, and said, "He told me you'd probably come."
"Did he."
"He said if you came, you could sand." Danny handed him a block wrapped in fine-grit paper. "He said you'd do it wrong at first."
He did it wrong at first. He pressed too hard and went through to the gelcoat in a spot the size of a quarter, and Mr. Tran came over and looked at it and sighed and showed him how to hold the block flat, how to let the paper do the work, how to feel through his fingertips for the moment the old gloss went dull. After that, the three of them worked side by side without talking much, and the sun came up through the live oak and dappled the hull, and somewhere in the house a radio was playing Vietnamese ballads, and the bayou slid by brown and slow at the end of the dock.
Around nine, Mrs. Tran came out of the house carrying a tray. She set it down on the workbench: three bowls of rice porridge with ginger and scallion and shredded chicken, and a small dish of chili sauce. She looked at Wade for a long time, as she had looked at him the first day from her garden. He stood up straight under it, the way you stand for inspection.
"You are Earl's grandson," she said. Her English was more accented than her husband's, and slower, and every word sounded chosen.
"Yes ma'am."
"You look like him. Here." She touched her own jaw. "When he brought the paint, he stood on my steps like this." She hunched her shoulders and stuck out her chin and glared at the ground, and it was so perfectly, painfully Earl Pruitt—Wade had a hundred photographs of his grandfather standing exactly like that—that he laughed out loud before he could stop himself, and then was afraid he shouldn't have.