The Miss Lan was nineteenth in line.
She was the smallest boat in the procession by a good eight feet, but nobody on the seawall would have said so. Her stripe was fresh and deep and green as a magnolia leaf, and it caught the sun and threw it back. Mrs. Tran sat in the bow in her straw hat with a string of paper lanterns across her lap. Danny, who had passed his algebra test with a B-minus, stood at the stern in a clean white shirt. Mr. Tran had the tiller. And amidships, on the cooler, in a Bayou Clement Pirates sweatshirt with no badge anywhere on it, sat Officer Wade Pruitt, holding a framed photograph in both hands.
It was the photograph from his mother's wall. Earl and Delia in front of the Delia P., his grandfather squinting, his grandmother laughing at something off-camera. Wade had taken it down that morning, and his mother had watched him do it and then gone and gotten her purse and driven to the seawall, where she now stood at the rail between Aunt Patsy and Bud Theriot, shading her eyes with one hand.
As the skiff came past the seawall, Patsy leaned over the rail. She had been crying earlier; it showed. But her voice carried.
"Mr. Tran!"
He throttled back. The skiff drifted.
"My boy says he's sorry," Patsy called. "He says he'll come tell you himself when he's earned it. He says he doesn't know how long that'll take."
Mr. Tran looked up at her for a moment. Then he raised his voice, just enough to be heard over the brass band.
"Tell him I'm at the ramp," he said. "Five o'clock. Every day. He knows."
Bud Theriot laughed, the big laugh, the one that went out over the water. Wade's mother didn't laugh. She was looking at the photograph in her son's hands, and at the green stripe on the hull beneath him, and then back at the photograph, and Wade understood, watching her, that she was checking the color. Checking it twice. In the faded print, the stripe of the Delia P. had always been a grayish nothing, a blue-gray smudge. But held up there over the side of the Miss Lan, in the clean May light, beside its own descendant, you could see it for what it was. You could see it had always been green.
The skiff came up to the end of the pier. Father Broussard dipped his aspergillum and lifted it high, and the water flew out in a glittering arc across the bow, across Mrs. Tran's straw hat, across Danny's clean shirt, across the old man at the tiller and the photograph in Wade's hands and Wade's own upturned face, cold and bright as a handful of coins.
"Bless this boat," said Father Broussard, "and all who sail in her."
Mr. Tran opened the throttle, and the Miss Lan went on down the harbor in the sun, small and white and green, and nobody on the seawall looked at her and saw anything but exactly what she was.