he blew his head off. What kind of inner hurts did Eve carry?
She was getting hazy in the afternoon sun, talking on and off. Midsentence she began to snore. “Let her doze,” said Finn. “I need to stop for petrol anyway.”
“How far are we from Paris?” We’d all agreed on a night’s stay in Paris on the way to Limoges.
“A few hours.”
“We’ve already been driving for hours. It’s not that far.”
Finn grinned. “I took a wrong turn listening to her describe how to decode ciphers, and we went halfway to Rheims.”
In a pearly pink twilight we stopped at a drab hotel on the outskirts of the city—no boulevard grandeur on this shrinking wallet. But shrinking wallet or no, there was something I had to buy, once Eve and Finn were checking into the hotel that smelled of day-old bouillabaisse. After a short wander down the line of shops, I found a pawnshop. It took only a few minutes to find what I needed, and I was on my way back to the hotel when I passed another shop. Secondhand clothes, and I was tired of alternating the same three sets of clothing and sleeping in my slip.
A saleswoman looked up from the counter: one of those tiny purse-lipped Frenchwomen with perfectly tailored hems, like a chic little monkey. “Mademoiselle—”
“It’s Madame.” I set down my pocketbook so she could see the wedding band on my left hand. “I need a few clothes.”
I gave her my budget as she evaluated my size in one sweep of her eyelids, and I tried not to twist the gold ring I’d bought from the pawnshop. It was a little too big, and so was the title Madame. But we were two years from the end of a war, and young widows were a common sight. I might have decided to keep the Little Problem, but I had no intention of being spit on as an unwed mother. I knew how this worked: you got a wedding ring, you made up a story about a boy who died in the war (in my case, after it) and embellished it with a few convincing details. Maybe people looked skeptical but they didn’t say anything because you had the right props: a secondhand wedding ring, and a dead husband.
Donald, I decided as I stepped into a cubicle to change. Donald . . . McGowan was my nonexistent dead husband. Half Scottish and half American, dark haired. Tank corps; served with Patton. The great love of my life, Donald was, dead in a recent car accident. He always drove too fast; I’d warned him and warned him. I’d name my child after him if he was a boy . . .
I imagined Rose wrinkling her nose at me. “You don’t want a son named Donald, Charlie. Really!”
“You’re right,” I told her. “But I think it’s a girl, anyway. So Donald will work just fine.”
“He sounds boring!”
“Don’t you insult my Donald!”
“Madame?” came the saleswoman, sounding dubious, and I tamped down my laughter, trying on one set of secondhand clothes after another. Under all these airy imaginings I was laying plans, however vague. Thinking that if I found Rose, there might be a place for the two of us together. Perhaps here in France, who knew? I had money, savings—why couldn’t we buy ourselves a new beginning, where two false Madames with two false wedding rings could make some kind of honest life? I thought of the Provençal café where I’d spent the happiest day of my childhood at Rose’s side. Was there a haven like that for us now that we were grown?
A café, I thought, remembering how much I’d enjoyed not just that Provençal afternoon, but my brief coffee shop job at Bennington. The waiting on customers, the rush of delicious smells, the easy pleasure of juggling orders and making change in my head. A café, somewhere here in France? I imagined a place with postcards for sale and sandwiches of soft goat cheese and marbled ham, where Edith Piaf played in the evenings and the tables were pushed back for dancing. Where two young widows kept the cash till and flirted with Frenchmen, though never without mournful glances at the photographs of our husbands. I’d have to get some good fake photographs . . .
“Bien,” the saleswoman said as I came out, nodding approval at the narrow black trousers and the cropped striped jersey cut high at the collarbone but nearly showing my midriff. “The New Look is