“Salaud!”replied the third driver. Luc pulled in front of both while they all continued to yell at each other. Marlow made a mental note to look up the word“branleur.”Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good.
Despite their fatigue and the stress from Luc’s driving—sudden lane changes, late swerves to catch off-ramps, swearing at other drivers—leaving Paris for the countryside was a delight: they were surrounded by vineyards, medieval churches, château ruins, tiny villages, and forest.
In fast French and with gesticulation that took his hands off the wheel, Luc yelled over the window’s flapping plastic that he hated highway driving. Life was not anautoroute,it wasroutes secondairesthat mattered. If you went too fast, you’d miss everything important. Marlow did not need a philosophy of life lecture from a guy who clearly didn’t wash and couldn’t use a turn signal to save his life (or theirs).
“Et que faites-vous à Mirabelle?”he asked.“Avez-vous de la famille là-bas?”
He eyed her shaking her head in the rear-view—no, they didn’t have family in Mirabelle. Could he keep his eyes on the road?
“Vous êtes des touristes alors?”
“Oui,”said Marlow, ending the conversation with a partial lie: they were only visiting, so technically tourists.
More forest acted like a soporific. Marlow and Sabine slept, waking only as Luc drove up a hill, passing a sign that readNenier, Petite Cité de Caractère—little city of character. Modern stucco houses formed the town’s base near a pharmacy and aboulangerie, then as they climbed the hill, the houses got older, not stucco but stone, with red clay tiled roofs covered in moss. A few houses’ shutters were open and painted in bright periwinkle blue, looking lived in and cared for. Others had closed, weathered shutters or no glass in the window frames, dark and empty inside. One had no front wall at all, like a sad, life-size, toy house. Bedraggled official papers affixed to the fence surrounding it were notice of work long forgotten.
Luc parked in a gravel lot, got out, and pulled their luggage from the minibus.
“Merci,”said Marlow.“C’est Mirabelle-les-Roches?”
“Non. Mirabelle, c’est là-haut.”He pointed up the road where it split. One fork took the main road back down the hill. The other narrowed considerably and twisted immediately at an old, crumbling stone archway so that its destination could not be seen. It felt a little mysterious. Enchanted. Like a medieval fairy tale.
“La camionette ne peut pas y monter,”Luc said, explaining that the minibus couldn’t get up there.
“Merci. Et les bureaux du mairie?”Marlow asked, asking for the city hall. She’d looked it up. A bigger town’s city hall was anhôtel de ville. A smaller town’s city hall was amairie.
“De la.”
“Pardon?”
“De la.La mairie. Mairie, c’est féminin.”
Jet-lagged, exhausted, and operating in a second language, Marlow did not have the bandwidth to be corrected. It was also ridiculous that the French word for feminine was masculine. It should be “féminine,”not“féminin.”But she wouldn’t get into that.
Luc gestured to a well-kept building markedhôtel de ville, a European Union flag and two French flags flying above its front doors.
Should she get him to stick around so he could drive them to the hotel Sabine had booked? They were in the middle of nowhere, and he was their only mode of transportation.
“Mais ce n’est pas ouvert,”he said.“C’est l’heure du déjeuner. Revenez à quatorze heures.”
“Closed for a two-hour lunch?” said Marlow to Sabine. “How does anything get done?”
“Here in my country,” scoffed Luc, “we do not make it all about work. Here, how do you say, we work to live, not live to work.”
“Walked right into that one,” said Sabine.
“First of all, that’s a cliché,” said Marlow. “Second, you speak English! Why didn’t you speak English at the airport?”
“Nous sommes en France, Madame,”said Luc.“En France, nous parlons français.”
Marlow would not ask if he’d wait for them to do their city hall business. She’d find another way. As if reading her mind, Luc headed down the hill on foot.
“Bonne chance, la dame et demoiselle! Bienvenue en France!”
Sabine decided to wander to keep from wanting to sleep. She walked past a small store, closed up behind rusting metal shutters. Its sign, dangling off a loose metal bracket, readAntiquités.She found a patch of grass around a moss-covered stone monument. The sun had found a hole in the clouds and was beating down on this very spot, beckoning her. The jet lag was making her feel unwell, overheated, thick-headed. She lay down and closed her eyes.
She wondered what Willa was up to. If it was afternoon here, it was morning in Toronto—in other words, Willa was asleep. Sabine could text her, say they’d arrived safely, but her phone was still on airplane mode. She wasn’t going to take it off to earnsome obscene roaming fee or send a fifteen-dollar text. And there was not a cell phone store to be seen.
She was just drifting off when she heard heavy breathing. She squinted into the sunshine to see a fit guy about her age, in an upscale athletic outfit and pristine white runners, dripping sweat. He’d obviously just finished a run.
