But Mrs. Tran smiled. It transformed her face completely. "Eat," she said. "You are too skinny for a policeman. The other ones are fat." And she went back inside.
They ate on the dock with their feet hanging over the water. Wade waited until his bowl was almost empty.
"My mother told me," he said. "About 1981. And Elena. And the paint."
Mr. Tran nodded slowly, his eyes on the water.
"Why'd you go out there?" Wade said. "That night. After what they did to your boat. After everything. You heard them on the radio and you went out in a hurricane with no lights. Why?"
The old man was quiet for so long that Wade thought he might not answer at all. A mullet jumped near the dock, twice, and fell back with a slap.
"When I was twenty-four," Mr. Tran said finally, "I was on a boat with eighty-one people. Built for maybe twenty. Six days. On the fourth day, a big ship came. Very big, very close. We waved shirts. We screamed. Children screaming. Everybody on that ship looked down at us. I could see their faces." He set his bowl on the boards. "They kept going. On the fifth day a man and his little girl went over the side in the night and we never found them. On the sixth day, a fishing boat from Malaysia came. Old, falling apart, worse than ours almost. They took us all. They gave us their water. Their own water." He looked at Wade. "I think about that ship every day of my life. I don't want to be that ship. So I hear Earl Pruitt on the radio and I think, okay. I know those faces. I don't want to be one of them. That's all. It's not so noble. Mostly it's selfish. I don't want to carry that, so I go."
"In the water," Danny said quietly, from the other side of him, as if quoting something, "nobody has a color."
"Ah," Mr. Tran said, looking embarrassed. "I say that one time, twenty years ago, at the school career day, and this boy remembers it forever."
"You say it every time somebody asks about the hurricane."
"Then nobody should ask me about the hurricane." But he was smiling.
Wade looked at the lid nailed above the workbench. "And the paint?"
"Earl put three cans on my steps and said, 'It's good paint.' Then he went away fast, like a dog that stole a chicken." Mr. Tran's mouth twitched. "Lan was very angry. She said, he paints those words on our boat and then he gives us paint? She wanted to throw it in the bayou. I said no. I said, look—he could have given us nothing. He could have pretended. He is a hard man, a proud man, and he walked up these steps with paint in his arms, and that was the hardest thing he ever did in his life, I think. So I keep it. Next year I build this skiff, and I paint the stripe with his green. When the cans run out, I take the lid to the paint store and I make them match it. Every spring, I paint it again." He shrugged. "Every spring, I remember. A man can change his mind. Not all the way, maybe. Not with words. But a little. Enough to walk up some steps."