his next trick, he will administer oral rehydration salts and give measles vaccinations!
He felt like turning around and leaving. But the crowd filled in behind him and Bellamy was taking his beat-up backpack from him.
His mother clutched his shoulders. “Ah, Jacques, your hair. Why so long?” She fingered his long ponytail of chestnut-brown hair. “And la barbe that hides your handsome face?” She tapped his beard. “You look like one of those scruffy men who live in the subway.” She, of course, was impeccably turned out in a flowing silk peach-colored lounge suit, the perfect outfit for an evening party at home.
“Maman, please.” He took her hand away from his face but kissed the back of it so she wouldn’t fuss.
She dimpled at him. “Someone else is waiting to kiss you,” she said coyly.
He had no idea who. “Bellamy?” He was their ancient butler and the idea of being kissed by the old English fossil made him crack the first smile of the evening.
Unfortunately his mother misunderstood. “Oh, you funny boy. But that smile tells me you know who I mean.”
“Actually, Maman, I don’t…” he began, and then his teeth clicked together in shock at the person she intended him to kiss.
He’d rather have dysentery again.
“Nadine.” It was difficult to pronounce his ex-fiancée’s name from a clenched jaw, but he did just fine.
She took that as an invitation instead of an expression of dismay. “Oh, mon amour!” She flung her expensively dressed arms around his neck and tried to kiss him, but he turned his head and was happy to see her spitting out strands of his hair instead.
He took her by the upper arms and tried to set her away from him, but her grip reminded him of a gecko he’d watched while lying in a hospital bed in Thailand. That sticky-footed lizard could walk upside down on the ceiling and even across glass without falling. Of course it could also lick its eyes with its tongue, something that Nadine had not mastered—as far as he knew. What she did with her tongue was none of his business anymore. It was what she had done with it while it had been his business that had caused their breakup.
So why was she here, reenacting The Hero’s Welcome from a black-and-white postwar movie? Jacques looked around at his proud mother and her well-lubricated guests eyeing him and beautiful blonde Nadine fondly. Nadine wisely decided not to kiss him again and instead threaded her arm through his, snuggling into his side. A hired waiter pressed a glass of champagne into his hand that wasn’t suctioned to Nadine, and his mother raised her own glass. “To my son, Jacques Charles Olivier Fortanier Montford, Comte de Brissard.” As usual, she forgot the title he valued the most—doctor.
But the guests cheered anyway. Perhaps his beard hid what had to be a sour expression. Huzzah, huzzah. All that was needed was a rousing orchestral version of “La Marseillaise” as the weary warrior came limping back to Paris. He started to sing under his breath. “Allons, enfants de la Patrie…”
Nadine gave him a strange look and he remembered his precarious situation. She wanted nothing better than to be Madame la Comtesse de Brissard, and Jacques’s paltry wishes were the only impediment to her desire to enter the noblesse.
He detached himself from Nadine and raised his glass in fake cheer when he caught his mother staring at them. “Come with me, Nadine.”
He hurried her into the small hallway leading to the back stairs. Nadine looked at him apprehensively but reached out her arms to him.
Jacques folded his. “Nadine, what the hell are you doing here?” She started to pout, but he ignored it. “Were you hoping I’d developed amnesia along with dysentery?”
“Jacques!”
He was too tired to be kind anymore. “Go away, Nadine. I don’t know what you’ve been telling my mother all these months, but it doesn’t seem to have been the truth.”
“But, mon cher, we just had a little misunderstanding before you left. If you had stayed instead of going to that dreadful typhoon, we would have smoothed things over in no time.”
His jaw fell. “Nadine, I caught you having sex with your personal trainer. In our bed.”
“I know, I know.” She pasted an anguished expression on her face. “And I feel terrible about that. I made a mistake.”
I, I, I. Or as his Portuguese friend Francisco would say, Ay, ay, ay. It was all still about her.
“No, Nadine. We were through as soon as you undressed