He scoffed. ‘I cannot lie… you did delay my plans to secure our family with the government, with Pétain. But like every good Frenchman I have refocused. Do not fear. I knew you couldn’t think of something like that on your own.’
I shook my head. ‘But I could, Papa. And I did think of it.’ As much as I didn’t want him to be angry with me for what I had done and where I had gone, I couldn’t let Mama take the blame. Though I had a feeling no matter what I said to try and convince him otherwise, he wouldn’t believe me.
‘What is done is done,’ he said. ‘You’re home now.’
I glanced over his things, the bar, and the bottles and bottles of wine meant to be sold, but why, and who was minding the vineyard?
‘Papa,’ I said. ‘Why are you here? Why aren’t you tending the estate?’
He rubbed his forehead, stalling. The vineyard had been in our family for generations, passed down from his father, whose father had passed it to him.
‘What’s going on?’
Papa placed some cheeses on a board for us to share, motioning for me to take a seat at one of his small tasting tables while adding some walnuts and dried apples from the canisters on the bar. The Fourme d’Ambert looked very blue as he cut into it, offering me a sliver straight from the knife.
‘There’s no water in the hills,’ he said. ‘The aquifer… it’s all dried up.’
‘Dig some more, Papa. It’s your wine.’
‘I wish I could, ma chérie,’ he said, cutting himself a bit of the Fourme d’Ambert. ‘The water is being used for other things.’
‘But the vineyard… all the field hands are gone,’ I said. ‘The vines will die.’
‘Pétain wouldn’t put the vineyards of Creuzier-le-Vieux at risk if he didn’t have to—we all have to sacrifice something for peace; this is mine.’ He patted my hand when I shook my head. ‘Do not worry. I’m making a good profit off what I have bottled. The regime comes only to me for their needs. I have no competition. You will see. Soon enough everything will be back to normal. Pétain has our best interests on his mind.’ Papa smiled. ‘I’m confident. He’s our hero.’
I put the sliver of cheese on the board uneaten. ‘But he handed over our soldiers, accepted defeat.’
‘Don’t believe everything your mother tells you, Adèle.’ He swallowed. ‘Nothing in war is easy. She tended the wounded, but I lived with them in the trenches, and with the dead buried in the cliffs of Gallipoli. Pétain gave us peace. Now we have to do our part.’ He glanced around his wine bar and over the Pétain posters pasted to his walls. ‘This is my part.’
‘Did you hear about Madame Brochard?’
‘The farmer’s wife?’ Papa grabbed an opened bottle he had under the front counter and poured some wine into the one clean glass he had on hand. He sipped the wine, rolling it in his mouth. When he noticed I was watching him, he turned the label around to show me the bottle was one of his. ‘Do you want some?’
‘Papa, she was arrested and sent to Drancy.’
‘Yes, yes, I heard… illegal immigration,’ he said, taking another drink of wine.
‘No, Papa. She’s not a foreigner. They arrested her because she is Jewish.’
‘Impossible.’ He set down his glass. ‘That is not a law. Did you hear this from your mother?’
The door flew open and hit the wall with a clatter, wine bottles clinking and clanging in their racks. Charlotte stood in the doorway, first looking happy to see me, and then not. It was the same look she’d give me when we were young, after she caught me using her paints without asking. ‘Back from the nunnery?’
‘Charlotte.’ I stood up, smiling cautiously, remembering that the last time she saw me I was running away from her.
Papa took his wine glass and headed upstairs to the flat he’d made above his wine bar. ‘I’ll find you a clean glass.’
She waltzed in, arms crossed, waiting until Papa was out of sight. ‘I was so angry with you, Adèle.’ She walked closer until she stood a breath away from my face. ‘You always do what you want when you want—never think about anyone else. I was tying up your bouquet the morning you left and you said nothing. Your own sister!’
I shook my head. ‘I know, and I’m sorry.’
‘People are calling you a runaway bride. It’s humiliating for all of us!