Just east of New Orleans, outside of the town of Slidell, something in the rear axle of the car gave way with a bang. The wrecker, when it showed up, was an old Ford with rust stains streaking down the fenders like stripes. A black-painted legend on the door read Dan Hebert Towing. Dan Herbert himself was thirty-ish, sun-dark, wearing Rayban sunglasses and a Peterbilt cap. "You called for a tow?" he asked them.

The garage that Dan Hebert towed the car to was just a large tin shed, open on one side, a concrete slab for a floor. It was set back from the road in a field by itself, surrounded by the rusty frames of twenty or thirty stripped cars. Dan eased the Monaco backwards into the shed, onto a waiting hydraulic lift.

Dan pointed out a wooden picnic table under an oak tree, among the carcasses of the parted-out cars. "You folks might want to just go ahead and sit down while I check this out. Shouldn’t take but just a little while."

Carley, Sarah’s little girl, scooted close to Sarah on the bench. She was four, small and blond-pale, and so shy of people that she hardly ever spoke, not even to Joe. "I’m hungry," she murmured into Sarah’s shoulder. Sarah stroked her hair. "We’ll get something in just a little bit," she told her, "just be patient."

After a few minutes under the car, Dan gestured Joe over, showed him a dark smear of oil across his fingertips. The oil was gritty and burned-looking, filled with tiny silver flecks of metal.

"That’s your ring and pinion right there," Dan said. "Gears ate themselves up. That much metal in the oil means there’s not much left of ‘em."

"You don’t think we can get it done tonight, then?"

"Naw, there’s no chance of that. It’ll take a couple or three hours just to get the part loose. You in a hurry?"

Joe looked over at Sarah and Carley where they sat at the picnic table. "Yeah, kind of. We got a funeral tomorrow afternoon, in Thomasville, Georgia. That’s still a good seven hours or more from here. And the truth is, that car’s about the only place we’ve got to sleep, if we’re going to have to spend the night."

Dan rubbed his hands together, considered. "Well, look," he finally said, "if you want it, I got a little trailer over by my place ya’ll can use tonight. Used to be there was a fellow worked for me lived in it. It ain’t all that much, but it’s a roof, and you’d be welcome to it."

Joe looked at his feet, embarrassed. "I appreciate it," he said. "I’ll go tell Sarah." He went back to the picnic table, where Sarah was braiding Carley’s thin hair, and explained about the car, and about Dan’s offer.

"It’s going to take all the money we have," he admitted.

She made a dismissive face. "It doesn’t matter. At least we’ll be back on the road." She finished the braid she had been working on. "There," she said to Carley, "aren’t we pretty, now?"

"Very pretty," Joe said, and the little girl looked up at him, touched her hand to the braid, and then nodded, as solemn and deliberate as the afternoon sun settling down behind the tin garage in all its summer heat.

They rode in Dan’s truck to his house, and Dan’s wife, Marissa, invited them into her kitchen and offered them coffee. Joe took a cup to be polite, though he didn’t much care for the stuff."Cute little girl," Dan’s wife said to Sarah, "I always wanted a little girl, but it’s just been boys for us. You’re both very lucky."

"Yeah," Sarah agreed. She glanced at Joe and gave him a quick smile at the misapprehension.

"Carley’s my niece," Joe said. "It’s a little complicated." He didn’t want to explain about his brother, who had gone overboard the week before from an oil-rig tender that was bringing him back from his job on a platform in the Gulf. About how Randy had left his wife and daughter a year ago, about how he, the brother-in-law, had driven all the way to Texas to get Sarah and Carley and bring them to the funeral, because Sarah had called and asked him to. Because there was nothing he wouldn’t do for Sarah, who was beautiful and sweet and didn’t deserve the selfish son-of-a-bitch she’d gotten in Randy.

Sarah spoke up. "I was married to Joe’s brother. It’s his funeral we’re going to. He drowned out in Gulf last week."

"Oh, Lord," Marissa said, "I’m sorry."

"It’s all right," Sarah said softly. "We weren’t together, anymore."

No one spoke for an awkward moment, the Dan blew on his coffee and said, "they got a bad differential. We’re gonna fix ‘em up first thing tomorrow, get ‘em back on the road." He glanced at his watch, then put down his cup. "Whoa, it’s getting late. I gotta get moving. Don’t want to miss any of the tide."

"The tide? Like in the ocean?" Joe asked, glad for a different subject.

"That’s my night job," Dan said. "It’s brown shrimp season right now. I run a thirty-two foot Lafitte skiff out in the Rigolets—that’s the channels that connect up Lake Pontchartrain to Lake Bourne, and beyond that to the Chandeleur Sound and the Gulf of Mexico." He looked at Joe and seemed to consider. "Truth is, I could use a hand, if you think you’d like to make a few bucks. It’d be nice to have some company—we’ll be out there to the wee-smalls, and there ain’t nobody to talk to out there on the water."

Joe looked at Sarah and she gave him a "why not?’ sort of shrug. "Sure, I suppose so," Joe said.
Marissa brought a small chocolate cake and some plates to the table. "Well, that’s settled then," she said, "but you need to try a piece of this gateaux, first, before ya’ll head out. It’s my mama’s recipe and I guarantee it’s the best thing you ever put in your mouth."

Dan snorted and held a hand up. "She don’t lie," he said.

The light was almost completely gone by the time Dan turned the boat out into the center of a channel that must have been a half-mile or more wide. He throttled back the engine and eased into a space among the other ten or dozen boats that were already in the channel, so the nearest boats fore and aft were maybe two hundred yards away. With the engine throttled back, it was suddenly much quieter, the only sound the low gurgle of the exhaust bubbling up through the water at the stern.

Most of the night was spent sitting on the ice-chests, waiting for the nets to fill. Dan sat at the wheel with a newspaper held down low behind the console, in the instrument light and out of the wind. He would look up every few seconds and make sure that the boat was on course and not encroaching on the lights ahead and lights behind, keeping them a constant two hundred yards or so away. Joe found it comforting to see those lights there, mounted in the dark expanse of water, red and green at bow and stern, starboard and port, steady as stars.

Far into the small hours of the morning, when the tide had eased off, Dan winched the nets up for the last time and headed the boat in. Somewhere in one of the secondary channels—Joe didn’t have the first clue where they were—Dan nosed the boat up to a muddy bank, and let it run aground so it would stay put while he and Joe sorted the shrimp and dumped out the by-catch.

Dan shut down the engine and simultaneously the running lights went out. For a few seconds Joe sat there in the dark, listening to the dog-lapping sound of the wake catching up and rolling in to the bank. He could feel how big the marsh was, all around him in the dark. It was a very lonely feeling, and the sound of water he couldn’t see, just barely moving, but everywhere, made him feel suddenly lost in the world. He felt frankly a little frightened.

But then Dan flipped on the big floodlight on the mast, and said, "all right then. Let’s get it done and go home." Joe helped him lift up one of the buckets full of shrimp and pour it into the sorting box, and they both settled into the reassuring practicalities of work, secure in the bright island of light and in each other’s company.

Joe spent most of the next morning at Dan’s garage, helping Dan remove the Monaco’s ruined differential. They were interrupted twice by calls for tows, and another time when Dan had to go to town for a part. Then the morning was gone, and Joe knew there was no way they would ever make the funeral, not now. There was nothing for it, and he felt a little relieved, frankly. There was nothing about funerals he liked, and he didn’t really much want to see Sarah cry. He knew she would, when she saw Randy in his casket, and he knew it would break his heart to hear it. He had been in love with her for a lot of years now, ever he since he’d met her when Randy was dating her, back in high school. She was the same age as his brother, about two years older than Joe was, and she haunted his dreams.

Now Randy was dead, and he didn’t even know how to talk to her beyond asking her if she was comfortable or she needed anything. How did you tell your dead brother’s wife that you loved her, even if your brother had abandoned her and left her poor and begging? You didn’t, not if you were any kind of man, or any kind of brother. That was a simple fact, and so Joe kept his mouth shut and his feelings to himself.

Late that night, Joe lay on the narrow couch in the trailer and tried to sleep. He was so completely aware of Sarah in the bed ten feet away from him that he couldn’t so much as doze. He could see her without looking at her, a picture in his mind that seemed to glow.

He lay awake for a long time, thinking about her, trying to make it reasonable to think of him and her together, living in the pig-shit trailer he had for a home, out in the woods where no one lived except him and his dogs. Tried to think of himself proposing that to her, asking her to forget she had been married to his dead brother, forget that her big dumb-ass brother-in-law had nothing in this world to offer her except for the fact that he loved her so much that it was making him sick with longing and loneliness.

He lay staring at the shadows gathered under water-stained ceiling and thought about Randy, drowned and dead, and now buried. About what he might have been thinking, in that last minute, when he was floating in the dark out there in the Gulf, fallen off a boat, and nobody had noticed or knew he was gone. That was loneliness, dying like that. He wondered if Randy had thought then about the mistakes he had made. All he had given up. He wondered if he had thought about Sarah, and maybe felt a little of what his brother felt now, lying in a musty trailer, just as far from her in his own way as Randy had been in that moment. Just as lost.

Then he thought about that dark moment out in the Rigolets when Dan had shut down the shrimp boat’s engine and the lights had gone out and left them in the absolute darkness of the marsh, in the middle of so much big water. A little extinction, was how it had felt, a little like the last moment before sleep, or what it must be like to be dead before you go to wherever it is you go.

But in the boat, you knew that someone else was nearby, there in the darkness with you, Dan with his hand on the switch that would open the night up and make it safe again. Joe shivered in the close, hot air in the trailer, and before he even knew he was going to do it, he began to cry for his brother, and for the irretrievable lost-ness that was being human.

There was a hand on his shoulder, and he opened his eyes to see Sarah in the dimness, standing over him. "You all right, Joe?" she whispered.

He took a moment, struggled to make his voice reasonably steady before he spoke. "Just fine," he said, and was ashamed at the tremor he heard under the words. "Just thinking about Randy."

"You’re a good man, Joe," she said, and she leaned over him, and she kissed him, once, softly on the lips. She lingered there for a moment, her skin a paper width’s from his own, her breath warm on his face, and he knew in his heart that he could take her in his arms, draw her to him, and she would come.

An image came into his mind: this woman standing under the pine trees in the woods in which he lived, watching him come home from the fields. Carley was there, holding her mother’s hand, and both were smiling and the air smelled of pine resin and clean earth, and overhead the sky was a deep and hopeless blue that went on forever. They were waiting for no one but him. Together, they would walk the rest of the way home without saying a word, because no words were needed.

A lie, and he knew it. He let it go because it hurt too much to hold.

She kissed him again, lightly on the forehead, and went back to her bed. He listened to her move into the sheets to lie beside her daughter. He could hear her breathing. After a while, her breathing deepened, and he knew she was asleep. After a longer while, he slept as well and when he dreamed, he dreamed about nothing at all.