“You’re not going to renovate in flip-flops, are you?” said Marlow.
“I live next door and can get changed any time,” he said. “You know this,non?” He didn’t even look at her, but Marlow went crimson at the thought of him in a towel. Lali saw it.
“Shall we see what needs to be done?” he asked, leaving the front hall.
Lali leaned into Marlow. “Perhaps you have good gossip after all.”
Cracks in the masonry needed stonework and mortaring. Shutters needed repair and repainting. Luc would then move inside to replaster the walls and ceilings. Lali and Marlow would repaint. Rémy had turned on the electricity so that Fedir the engineer could check for wiring issues.
Luc left and reappeared in work clothes and boots. He propped a ladder against the house, climbed it with ease, and pulled a screwdriver out of his pocket to remove the shutters.
“Shouldn’t we talk about what this is going to cost?” asked Marlow, holding onto the bottom of the ladder for safety.
“I’ll think about it.”
“You can’t give me an estimate?”
“Not really.”
“We shouldn’t start unless I know how much I’m paying.”
“Whatever you may think, I would not overcharge for this work. I want to revive Mirabelle. Like it or not, you’re part of that. It won’t cost the arm and the hand, don’t worry.”
“Thank you,” she said, a bit sheepish.It won’t cost the arm and the hand.She liked it. Come to think of it, she was sort of starting to like him, in a weird way.
She watched him work on the shutter screws—not easy, since they were rusted and worn. His triceps flexed as he worked. She’d been an arms gal since university when she dated a drummer who’d done the music on one of her short films. He’d been a bit of an oddball (Noah used to say, never date drummers or goalies—they’re on another planet), but this guy had had delicious guns for sure, and several arm tricks up his sleeve, like supporting her whole body weight when they did it standing, or even horizontal, which added a plank to the game—a physical feat. It had been a massive turn-on.
Luc’s arms were lean. Defined. Biceps like tennis balls under his skin. She shoved that thought into the back of her mind and held onto the ladder tight—if not for his balance, then for hers.
Over the next few weeks, things started to come together at Maison Perdue. Sabine and Aubin spent their time in the tiny courtyard, scraping and sanding the shutters, covering the courtyard with old paint flakes.
Lali brought out bags of junk from every room—old newspapers, the contents of drawers, broken tchotchkes, wallpaper that was peeling off the walls, lotion in the bathroom cabinetfrom the sixties. Multiple runs down to the Nenier parking lot dumpster bins had been required.
Fedir dealt with electrical and plumbing things and watched over Yakiv.
Sabine found a few curiosities and lined them up along the shed’s windowsill. A rusted Eiffel tower keychain. An ancient school exercise book half-filled with alphabet practice. A parcel of furled, faded maps of Paris, Lyon, Marseille, and Annecy. A hand-painted porcelain rabbit figurine that she and Aubin dubbed the patron saint of Maison Perdue.
Scraping the shutters was sweaty work, but she liked being outdoors after a seeming century in classrooms. “What’s it like around here?” she asked Aubin.
“Boring,” said Aubin. “There is no lycée—I think you call this the high school—in Nenier, so you take a bus, and when you get home at night, the social life disappears. Unless you have a car and can go to where the party is.”
“Which is what you do.”
“Maybe,” he said, smiling. “But it’s the same people over and over.”
It didn’t sound so boring to Sabine. “What are you doing in the fall?”
He shrugged. “My mother wants me to go to the Sorbonne in Paris for business and to continue to learn about themaison de champagnewith my uncle until I am ready to take it over.”
“And you don’t?”
He shrugged again. “I think it is easy for her to say, go here, do this, take care of the family business, when all she does is lie on the beach in Nice, or see shows in the West End, or go on endless cruises in the Mediterranean.”
“I see your point. And by the way, that ‘I don’t care’ shrug doesn’t work with me anymore.”
“Too bad. It is the move I prefer.”
“You must be pretty smart to get into the Sorbonne.”
