crossed the street, pausing to pick up a lone RAF leaflet that somehow survived morning foot traffic. He crumpled it in his hands and packed it like a snowball before throwing it at a man hunkered against the side of a building, picking stickers from the bottom of his feet.
The man looked up at Gérard with gaunt, sunken eyes.
‘Sure is, Papa.’
12
The savoury aroma of Mama’s pot-au-feu seeped from the cracks of her kitchen door and hovered in the late afternoon air. Nobody made stew like Mama: root vegetables from the cellar, and most likely the best cuts of meat from a special tin she hid under the mounds of canned ox tails. I dropped my bicycle on the patio, not even bothering with the kickstand. Comfort—that’s what I thought, as I smelled the clove and onion in the air, and God knew I needed a little comforting after the day I’d had, and maybe even a scalding hot bath with salts for my feet.
I opened the door and my heart leapt from my chest. Mama wasn’t the one at the stove, but a stranger. A man. I must have screamed since he jumped higher than I did. I drew a knife from the counter and waved it in the air. ‘Who are you?’ I barked.
One hand held his chest as he exhaled; the other held a soup ladle he’d been using to stir Mama’s stew. ‘You must be Adèle.’
I lowered the knife.
A dark blonde curl fell near his eyes, and he swept it back into a smooth wave. He was too young to be Mama’s lover, and by the distinguishing lines near his eyes I knew he was too old to be some boy Mama paid for handy-work.
‘Do I know you?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘but we know mutual people.’
‘My mother, you mean?’
He glanced back and forth between me and the ladle still in his hand, stirring faster the lower I dropped the knife.
‘Who are you?’ I said. ‘And where’s my mother?’
‘I’m Luc,’ he said. ‘Pauline has told me a lot about you.’
‘She’s told me nothing about you.’ I had lowered the knife completely, but still gripped the handle, looking around the room as if Mama was hiding somewhere. ‘Where did you say my mother was?’
He smiled slightly as he stirred the pot, and it was hard not to notice his long-lashed bluish-green eyes and the rugged shadow budding along his jawline.
‘I didn’t,’ he said.
My mouth hung open at his gall, and we stared at each other. I wanted to be mad at him, but something gleaming in his eyes and the way his lips looked when he smiled made it impossible for me to feel anything other than an irritating sense of intrigue.
Mama burst through the root cellar door, a jar of pickled onions gripped in her hand. She looked surprised to see Luc and I talking and then oddly complacent.
‘You’ve introduced yourselves,’ she said. ‘Good.’ Mama set the jar on the counter and popped the lid off.
I finally let go of the knife. ‘Introduced?’ I said. Luc glanced at me, which made me pause. ‘I suppose you could call it that.’
Mama asked Luc to pull the bouquet garni out of the pot. He seemed hesitant at first, looking into the pot as if unsure where it was, but then pulled out the soggy twine of herbs she had used for seasoning and set it on the counter.
Luc licked a drop of broth that had gotten on his finger. ‘This might be better if it were lamb.’
‘You can’t get lamb in Creuzier-le-Vieux,’ Mama said. ‘Pétain shipped it all to Germany.’
Luc took an unmarked bottle of wine and dumped what was left into a tall glass meant for milk. ‘At least he hasn’t given away all of the wine,’ he said, and Mama chuckled, though I could tell she wasn’t amused.
The strange scene that had unfolded itself before me took me by surprise as much as making me wonder. Mama didn’t share her kitchen with strangers, other than the rabbits and chickens she killed for us to eat. ‘What’s going on here?’ I waved a finger at everything from the boiling pot, to Luc, to Mama. ‘And I’m not talking about supper.’
Mama’s shoulders stiffened. ‘He’s not my lover, Adèle. If that’s where your mind is.’
‘I figured that, Mama.’ The sleeves on Luc’s collared shirt had been rolled up to his elbows, exposing the fine, ginger-blonde hairs on his forearms. ‘From the looks of him, I’m guessing he’s half your age.’