parting crowd, sweaty and beet red, dressed in a navy blue Milice uniform and steaming straight toward me. ‘You stood me up!’
‘What?’ I stepped backward into Charlotte’s closed door.
‘The dinner!’
‘I said I couldn’t go!’
He got few inches from me, calling me a tease and a bitch in the same breath. ‘Stop it!’ I cried. ‘Stop it!’ Spit spurted from his mouth onto my face as he berated me.
‘Once wasn’t enough! You had to do it again and on the night of my promotion!’ He threw his hand back and Papa flew out of his wine bar, demanding that Gérard stop cursing at me.
‘Leave her alone!’ Papa yelled. ‘Leave her be!’
Gérard growled, abandoning me for Papa, pointing a finger at him. ‘Your family will pay for this, Albert!’ He stepped closer and closer to him, but then froze at the sight of Prêtre Champoix rising up behind Papa.
‘Gérard!’ he said, voice booming. The longer he stared at him, the smaller Gérard seemed to become under the priest’s black cassock and the white eye of his clerical collar. ‘This woman is not yours to torment.’ He put a hand on Papa’s shoulder. ‘She’s broken no laws.’
There was a long, cold pause where nobody spoke.
‘You’re not welcome here anymore, Gérard,’ Papa said.
Prêtre Champoix pointed down the street with his Bible for Gérard to leave, but he looked at me first, flattened against Charlotte’s building, snarling, before adjusting his new Milice uniform jacket and stiffly walking away.
Papa took me in his arms. ‘Forgive me, ma chérie,’ he said, tearfully. ‘I believe you. I believe you.’
*
Papa and I sat across from each other at his usual wine-stained wood table. For a long time we sat in silence. I kept wondering when the next handful of Milice would come through the door, sit down and pour their own wine on Papa’s tab, but he had locked the door, and the shade was pulled down. He could barely look at me without tearing up. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, reaching for my hands. ‘I’m sorry for everything.’
I nodded, wiping a gush of tears away. I wanted to be mad at him for taking so long, but I felt more sad than anything. ‘What’s done is done, Papa. We have to move on.’ I reached for an unopened bottle of wine with a label I didn’t recognize, something German, though I couldn’t be sure.
‘No, Adèle,’ he said, touching my hand. ‘No wine today. Not from this place, not anymore. I should have never left the estate, or your mother.’
My eyes got wide, praying I heard him right. ‘Does this mean what I think you’re saying? You’re coming home?’
‘I heard Creuzier-le-Vieux isn’t what it used to be—that it smells of dust and rotted grapes—that the old Vichy vineyards are all but gone.’ He slumped forward, pulling Mama’s last letter from his pocket. ‘But that’s not what I think about when I think of Creuzier-le-Vieux.’
‘What do you think about?’
‘My family—how it used to be before the war. You and Charlotte cooking in the kitchen, laughing, being sisters, me and Pauline walking in her garden, being husband and wife.’ I touched his arm, and a spill of tears slid down both our cheeks as he fumbled with the letter. ‘What if it’s too late? What if she doesn’t want me back?’
For the first time in a long time I understood Papa, realizing why he hadn’t read Mama’s last letter. ‘You thought Mama wrote to say it’s over? No—it isn’t like that. She’s stubborn, yes, but the separation between you two is killing her. I see it in her eyes, the way she walks.’ I swallowed dryly, compelled to guess what she had written. ‘I think it’s an apology.’
‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ He unfolded the letter, adjusting it for light, reading it carefully. My stomach sank when I saw his eyes fade the further—the deeper—he got into her letter.
‘What is it, Papa?’ I tugged on his arm. ‘What does it say?’
He slammed his hand onto the table, cursing to himself. ‘Your mother’s sick.’
‘What?’ I reached for the letter, but Papa pulled it away.
‘It’s her sight,’ he said. ‘She says there are days when she can’t see, and she’s afraid she won’t remember what I look like.’ He put his fist to his forehead, clenching his eyes painfully shut.
I thought about all the times Mama had a headache, the way she walked—a little slanted at times—and her wavering moods. I couldn’t help feel a little responsible—I should have seen the signs.
‘Does it say