loaded back up, the nanny thought we’d climbed into the car with our parents and our parents thought we were with the nanny, and everyone drove off without us.
It was the only time I’d ever seen Rose scared, and I couldn’t understand it. We weren’t in any danger; the plump and motherly Provençal cook had made a great fuss over us once she discovered what had happened. “Don’t worry, mademoiselles! It won’t be twenty minutes before your mothers are back.” Soon we were settled at a table of our own under a striped awning overlooking the vineyard, with glasses of cold lemonade and thick sandwiches of goat cheese and prosciutto.
“They’ll be back soon,” I said, munching. As far as I was concerned, this was much better than sitting hot and cramped in the Renault’s backseat, getting admonished by the nanny and pinched by our brothers.
But Rose just stared down the road, not smiling. “Maybe they won’t come back,” she said. “My mother doesn’t like me.”
“Yes, she does.”
“Not now I’m getting, you know. Older.” Rose looked down at herself. Even at eleven she was starting to sprout a bust. “Maman doesn’t like it. She feels old.”
“Because you’re going to grow up even prettier than her. I won’t grow up pretty enough for mine.” I sighed, but the gloom didn’t last long. The day was too beautiful, and the smiling cook had just laid down a plate of piping-hot madeleines.
“Why is it always about being pretty with us?” Rose exclaimed, still glaring over the stunning view of vines and sky.
“Don’t you like being pretty? I wish I were.”
“Well, of course I like it. But when people meet our brothers, they don’t just comment on their looks, they ask, ‘How do you do in school?’ or ‘Do you play football?’ No one ever does that with us.”
“Girls don’t play football.”
“You know what I mean.” Rose looked stormy. “Our parents would never have left the boys behind. Boys always come first.”
“So?” That was just the way things were, not something to resent or even think about very much. My parents laughed indulgently whenever James pulled my hair, or dunked me in the stream until I was crying. Boys got to do whatever they wanted, and girls got to sit around looking pretty. I wasn’t very pretty, but my parents still seemed to have lofty plans for me: white gloves, a proper school, and becoming a Lovely Bride someday. Maman had already told me that if I was lucky, I’d be engaged by the time I was twenty, just like her.
Rose sat twisting the end of her blond braid. “I don’t want to just be pretty when I grow up. I want to do something different. Write a book. Swim the Channel. Go on safari and shoot a lion—”
“Or just stay here forever.” The smells of wild lavender and rosemary on the summer breeze, the warmth of the sun overhead, the sound of happy French babble from other diners, the goat cheese and crusty bread delicious on my tongue—this little café seemed just like heaven as far as I was concerned.
“We’re not staying here forever!” Rose looked worried again. “Don’t say that.”
“I was just joking. You don’t really think they’d leave us here, do you?”
“No.” I could see her trying to be rational, the big girl of eleven who knew so much more than me. But then she whispered, as if she couldn’t help it, “What if they don’t come back?”
I think I realized then why Rose was such a friend to me. She was two years older, she could have brushed me off as a little pest, yet she always welcomed my tagging along. Sitting in that heavenly café, I saw it: her brothers had their own games, her mother resented her just a little, her father was always working. Except for these summers when I came to visit and became her loyal shadow, she was lonely.
I was only nine. I couldn’t put any of this into words, or even understand it as well as I did later. But I had some muddled idea, seeing her fight the fear that her parents wouldn’t bother coming back for her, and I squeezed her hand. “Even if they don’t come back, I’m here,” I’d said. “I won’t leave you.”
Miss?”
I blinked, coming back from summer of ’37 to May of ’47. Memory had dragged me down so strongly, it was a shock to look over and see Finn’s dark eyes and tousled hair instead of eleven-year-old Rose’s