by Rose, Katia
Papa didn’t fade away like this. The cancer moved fast. He got thinner, yes, and his voice lost the lustre that seemed to draw everyone to his words like a warm fire on a cold night, but even at the very end, he still looked like he would spring up out of bed and ask for a glass of wine.
The housekeeper brings tea and a tray of biscuits neither of us touches; we’re too busy talking to eat. It’s been over a year since Maman’s last trip to Canada, and even though I already know how the wineries are doing and she’s already aware of all my business plans, we discuss every facet of our day to day lives like we’re sharing them for the first time. The stories all sound new when we’re sitting here in the same room, breathing the same air.
I think that’s how it always is with mothers: you don’t realize how much you miss them until you’re back by their side.
The only thing we avoid talking about is Monroe. As far as I know, Maman is still convinced she’s a con artist out to charm her way to my fortune, and I’m still too strung out over the lack of texts or calls on my phone to want to start hashing that out again.
When it seems we’ve finally run out of things to say, I nod at the book Maman set down on the bedside table.
“What were you reading to her?”
She tilts the cover of Madame Bovary up so I can see it. “Flaubert.”
I stare at the green canvas of the cover, its letters scrawled in swooping silver loops. It’s one of the books my father always seemed to have on hand, another of the ‘great works of French literature’ he used to quote so much.
“Maman,” I find myself asking before I can think better of it, “do you even like Flaubert?”
She squints at me. “Your father liked Flaubert very much, Julien. He said—”
“But do you?” I interrupt. “Do you like Flaubert?”
She searches my face, considering me carefully before she replies. “It’s an important book. It’s one everyone should read.”
“But do you like it?”
She taps her nails against the cover, and I notice her usual French manicure is missing.
“Are you trying to tell me something, mon fils?”
“I just...” I trail off, letting my eyes wander to the bed and then quickly back to her. Maybe it isn’t the time or place for this conversation. “I’ve just been thinking.”
She reaches for my hand. Hers looks so tiny clasped in mine.
“I’ve been thinking too.”
She pauses long enough that I think she’s going to leave it at that, but then she lets out one of those so-very-French sighs and continues.
“I always told you I didn’t understand why you wouldn’t take the trust fund money, but I think maybe I did. I think it might be the same reason I read all those books your father loved.” My shock must register on my face because she pats my hand while her lips twist up in a little smile. “This isn’t the first time I’ve thought about it. Tell me something, Julien. I’ve always wondered—did you leave Cambridge because it was what you wanted, or because...because it’s what you felt you had to do?”
“I mean, it—it wasn’t so much what I wanted to do as what I needed to do,” I admit. “I felt stuck at Cambridge. I wasn’t going anywhere fast enough. Papa never even went to school, and—”
“But he always wanted you to.”
“He said that,” I counter, “but I always felt like he was disappointed in me for going to England. He understood why I wanted to leave the wineries, why I wanted something that was mine, but I don’t think a degree from Cambridge University would have been enough for him.”
“Would it have been enough for you?”
I look into her eyes and answer honestly, more honestly than I’ve been able to answer to myself for years.
“I don’t know. These past few months, I...I just don’t know.”
My mother looks toward her own mother. “It makes the past feel more immediate, doesn’t it? When someone is...”
Dying.
“I think all the big moments do that,” I say softly. “All the comings and goings, the ends and the beginnings...”
I picture Monroe, her head tipped back to stare up into my eyes, that wide smile and the determined set of her brow. That’s what she is to me: a beginning.
“That girl,” Maman begins, nearly making me jump at the way she seems to have read my mind, “tell me about her.”
“You mean the gold digger?”
She gives me a grimace that tells me to knock it off.
“I only said that because you hardly gave me any information about the woman before you told me you wanted to buy her a property. So tell me about her.”
I gently detach my hand from hers and then lock both of mine behind my head, settling deeper into my chair. “What do you want to know?”
“Hmm. What are your favourite things about her?”
I laugh—really laugh—for what feels like the first time in days.
“How much time do you have?”
* * *
Grand-mère passes away in her sleep the same night I arrive.
The nurse they hired to care for her wakes Maman and I up just before dawn. She tells us Grand-père has been sleeping in the chair next to the bed every night and didn’t want anyone to know. He was there holding her hand when she passed.
The funeral is a small one. We could have called in half the French aristocracy, but most of them would only have come for appearance’s sake; my grandparents retired from society a long time ago. The black-clad crowd is a mix of extended relatives, household staff, winery employees, and a few of my family’s oldest friends from around Bordeaux. I haven’t seen any of them in years, and I hear the murmurs every time someone recognizes me.
It’s a strange thought, and probably not even an appropriate one, but I can’t help imagining what it would be like to have Monroe beside me, holding my arm and wearing a black dress to match my suit. I know it would make today easier.
The sun is beating down on the earth as we lay Grand-mère to rest. It’s a day for cold drinks on porches, for reading books in lawn chairs and wandering between the rows and rows of vines. Somehow, it seems like the right day for a funeral, for the end of a long life well lived. She may have been a prime example of an aloof and icy Frenchwoman staring down at the world with her chin held high, but my grandmother left this world with a husband who loved her like she was the first star in the night sky and a daughter who will treasure her memory far more than any of the possession’s she’s left behind.
I hold Maman as Grand-père stands stiffly beside us, watching the coffin get lowered into the dirt. I hold her the way I wasn’t there to hold her when she said goodbye to Papa.
We’re the last ones to leave, the crowd dispersing to give us our privacy.
“Could I have a moment with her?” Maman asks, her voice steadier than I expected.
Grandpère slips silently away. I squeeze her shoulders before turning to do the same.
“Julien,” she calls, making me pause. “I think you should go see him.”
My throat closes up. Blood rushes in my ears, and the ground seems to lurch under my feet. I spread them wider apart to steady myself.
I knew he was buried here, but I’d been doing my best to ignore it.
“I ca—” I start to say those same words again, that admission of defeat, that surrender to a power greater than anything I could want for myself, but I’ve said them enough. I’ve backed myself into that corner too many times. “I will. Where...?”
She doesn’t make me ask the question, doesn’t force me to admit I don’t know the way to my own father’s grave. She just points.
It’s only a few spaces over from where they put Grand-mère. The headstone is black marble, glinting sharply in the bright afternoon light, but the letters carved into its surface seem to make my whole world go dull.
Pierre Antoine Joséph Valois.
My father.
My father is dead.
I stop caring a
bout who might be watching or that Maman is only a few feet away. I drop to my knees.
“Mon père.” I feel the press of soft earth and hard stones through the fabric of my black dress pants. Birds are singing in the trees at the edge of the cemetery. You can’t see it from here, but there’s a vineyard just beyond the little forest at the top of the hill. “Papa. I...I’m sorry I wasn’t there for her when she needed it. You would have been ashamed.”
I glance over at Maman where she’s murmuring to herself by Grand-mère’s headstone. I can only imagine what she must have felt facing the same moment here at my father’s grave all by herself. I turn back to the stoic letters in the marble.
“But that’s all I’m sorry for. You...You were my hero. I still believe you were a good man. A great man. I would never ask for a different father, but I don’t need a hero anymore. I don’t need an idol. All my life I’ve been trying to build something for myself, but I’m starting to see that maybe a lot of me was building it for you. I lived so much of my life trying to make you proud. I wanted to measure up. That was always my motivation, but...it can’t be. Not anymore.” I lay my hand on the stone, my fingers shaking as they trace the shape of his name. “This needs to end. This needs to end so I can begin.”
I leave the graveyard with my mother. Just as we’re about to step out onto the gravel drive and head to the waiting car, she lays her hand on my arm. I pause when she stops walking.
“He was proud of you, you know?” She shades her eyes and stares into the cemetery. “The day you left for Cambridge, he told me it didn’t matter what you did. It didn’t matter where you went or who you decided to become. It just made him happy to see you living your life. Everything you did made him happy because you were his son.”
I open my mouth to speak, but my throat has closed up again. Maman turns to me.
“You are his son. Every time I look at you, I see him.” Her voice falters, but she goes on. “It’s not because you’re successful or driven or ambitious. That’s not what I loved about him most. That’s not what I’m so grateful he passed onto you. When I look at you, I see his kindness. I see his loyalty. I see his devotion—not to things, not to projects, but to people. People he loved. You have so much love in you, Julien. I don’t want you to hide it or throw it away. Papa wouldn’t want that either.”
I take her hand in mine. It’s all I can do to murmur, “Je t’aime.”
She smiles like she can hear every other word I want to say, and I realize she probably does hear them. She knows me. She’s my mother. Just like the time she bought a thousand dollar dog for me when she knew I needed a friend, she knew exactly what I needed to hear today.
At Maman’s insistence, it’s only another two days before I leave France. I would have stayed as long as she asked, but I couldn’t hide my relief when she told me I needed to book a ticket back to Monroe or she would book it for me. I considered sending everything in a text, but there are things Monroe needs to hear from me face to face.
I’m ready for this to start, and I want to start it right.
I should feel nervous when the wheels of the plane touch down in Montreal, but instead, I feel more alive than I’ve ever felt before. I’m filled with energy, with drive, with motivation and will—with all the things that have gotten me where I am and have never failed me before—but there’s something new this time, a new flavour whose taste makes me thirst for it all the more: purpose.
My purpose.
Twenty
Monroe
ATTENUATION: The process by which sugar is absorbed and converted into alcohol during the brewing of a beer, determining its alcohol content and how sweet or bitter the resulting flavour will be
I’ve had my key to Taverne Toulouse since I was barely more than a teenager. It’s the same one the bar’s old manager gave me when I officially became a shift opener. The original key has filtered down through so many copies you have to know the exact right way to jiggle the lock, but I’ve never replaced it.
That’s mostly because Fournier wouldn’t approve the cost of re-doing all the locks in the bar, but still, it doesn’t make it any less tragic to think of sliding the piece of metal off my dorky Celtic knot key ring and dropping it in Fournier’s hand.
Two weeks from now, that’s exactly what I’ll be doing. They settled on handing the property over in mid-July. It will screw with Julien’s timeline, but I’m sure he’s thrilled with the deal he got.
Not that I’m bitter.
Not that I’m completely shattered and utterly gutted every time I even think about it.
He called me for days and left me an essay’s worth of texts saying he had an explanation and that he needed to see me in person. At one point, I actually gave in to my morbid curiosity and told him to meet me at my apartment. He replied saying he had left Montreal and didn’t know exactly when he’d be back. Apparently he had a good, needs-to-be-delivered-in-person explanation for that too, but I’m done with games. This is so far beyond a game. I asked him not to call me anymore, and he was smart enough to listen.
I pretend I don’t miss him. I pretend he’s not the last thing I think about at night. I’m holding out for the day I won’t have to pretend anymore, but I’ve got a feeling I’ll be holding out for a long, long time.
I stop fondling my keys like a senile old woman who can’t remember why she’s leaving the house and lift my bag onto my shoulder before heading out of my office. It turns out closing a bar down is even more of a logistical nightmare than keeping one open, and I’ve been working even longer hours than usual. In a cruelly ironic twist of fate, business has been booming all week while our staff dwindles more by the day, which means I’ve had to put in some time out on the floor to keep things afloat.
“You two okay to close?” I ask DeeDee and Zach, the only staff I have available to handle a nearly full house.
“It’s slowing down now. We’ll be fine,” Zach assures me. “This ain’t our first rodeo.”
“Va-t’en, putain!” DeeDee adds.
Her order of, ‘Get lost, whore,’ is typical DeeDee, but luckily I know her well enough to understand she’s really trying to say I’ve worked hard and deserve to go home.
“Call me if you need me,” I order as I make my way through the bar gate.
I pause for a moment to watch Zach load up DeeDee’s tray with the pints he’s pouring, his face lit up like a Christmas tree as he laughs at whatever she just said to him. Honestly, he’d probably still be looking at her like that if she told him she had to go take a piss.
If anything good comes of this bar closing, it will be the impetus for that boy to grow a pair and tell her how he feels.
“Goodnight!” they both chorus as I’m leaving.
It’s almost nine o’clock, but the sky still holds a fading imprint of daylight as I make my way home. I trudge up the staircase to the landing outside my door, and I can’t help remembering what a pain in the ass it was to move here. I lived in a dorm for my first year of school and then shared an apartment downtown with some girls from my program. When I finally decided to get my own place, the first item on my list of requirements was that it be within walking distance of Taverne Toulouse.
I guess there’s no point in that now. I could end up working all the way across the city. For the first time in years, I have no idea what the next month of my life is going to look like.
I pull the door open and reach for the entryway’s light switch. It’s only once I’ve got my shoes off that I notice the crumpled yellow envelope on the floor. It must have been wedged in the doorframe.
I pick it up, expecting some sort of advertisement or flier, but it’s just a plain, sealed envelope—with my name written in blue cursive letters on the front.
The back of my neck starts to tingle, and I reach for the lock on my door. Someone was at my apartment, someone who knows my name and how to find me. Anyone I can think of who’d have an envelope to give me would have just called my cell.
The Tw
ilight Zone theme song starts playing in my head as I take a seat on my couch. I know I’m being paranoid, but when you live alone, anything slightly freaky is an automatic threat.
I rip the envelope open with my fingers, nearly tearing the bundle of papers inside in the process. It’s some sort of legal document, but I haven’t even started on the first sentence when I notice the handwritten note included with the pages. The words are inked in the same blue pen and tidy cursive as my name on the front.
‘A very little key will open a very heavy door.’
-Charles Dickens
Chère Monroe,
I’ll admit it. I had to Google that quote. I knew you would probably only bother reading this note if it started off with some words from your beloved Monsieur Dickens, so I found something to suit the occasion.
I haven’t gotten my key to Taverne Toulouse yet, so consider me giving you this document to mean the same thing. If you sign it (along with several other lengthy contracts that were too big to fit in the envelope) the bar will be yours. Completely. I bought it for you—not because I think you need me, or anyone, to buy you things. I bought it because before you, I never wanted another person’s success as much as my own. That never would have changed if I hadn’t met a woman good, kind, and courageous enough to fight for the happiness of others the way I’ve seen you fight for it every day since I met you.
You’ve changed me. I haven’t even known you for four months, and you’ve changed me. This is my way to prove it to you. This is my way to promise that the past made me who I was—not who I am. I’ve never felt this way about my future before. It’s like for the past thirty-two years, I was living for someone else. I was being someone else.