"Nothing."

She nodded, her eyes still translucent, empty of anything I could read. Then she said, "The lawyers say we still got a chance with the Supreme Court. I wake up in the morning and think maybe it's all gonna be okay. We'll get a new trial, a new jury, the kind you see on television, full of people who turn abused women loose. Then I fix coffee and the day's full of spiders."

I stared at her back while she raked. She stopped and turned around.

"Something wrong?" she said.

"I didn't mention Little Face Dautrieve was black," I said.

She removed a strand of hair from the corner of her mouth. Her skin looked dry and cool inside the smoke from the fire, her hands resting on the rake, her shoulders erect.

"What are the odds she work for Zipper and she white?" she said.

When I didn't reply her eyes wandered out into the yard.

"I'll stay in touch," I said finally.

"You bet, good-looking man, you."

I operated A BOAT-rental and bait business on the bayou down toward Avery Island, south of New Iberia. The house my father had built of cypress sat up on a slope above the dirt road, its wide gallery and rusted corrugated roof shaded by live-oak and pecan trees. The beds were planted with roses, impatiens, hydrangeas, and hibiscus, and we had a horse lot for Alafair's Ap-paloosa and a rabbit hutch and a duck pond at the foot of the backyard. From the gallery we could look down through the tree trunks in the yard to the dock and concrete boat ramp and the bait shop and the swamp on the far side. At sunset I pulled back the awning on the guy wires that ran above the dock and turned on the string of overhead lights and you could see the bream feeding on the insects around the pilings and the water hyacinths that grew in islands among the cypress knees. Every night the sky over the Gulf danced with heat lightning, white sheets of it that rippled silently through hundreds of miles of thunderheads in the wink of an eye.