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“Riding his bike home from work. A car hit him.”
“How long had you been married?” Kat asks as Anna lets soft tears flow.
“Counting the three-week honeymoon, four and a half weeks.”
“Oh God.” Anna cries more insistently now. “Love. So precious.” Jean gives me a look.
“You get used to her.”
She tidies up our table and a busboy takes the plates away. Someone else delivers a chocolate pastry. She continues telling the story while filling our water glasses. “We came here for dinner and lunch a lot over the three weeks we spent here. I got to know the owners, and they took me in when I showed up a blubbering mess a couple of months later.”
“Doesn’t it hurt every day to be reminded of it?”
Jean keeps talking like the story belongs to the air here, not just to her.
“It’s not France where the pain lived. It connected me to him when I didn’t think I could go on. It’s become something else. It’s going to sound a little hokey, but the happiness I have now wouldn’t be as rich and deep if I hadn’t gone through it all. I chose to create instead of destroy.” Jean sips the last of her wine while standing there.
Kat raises her camera. “Is this okay?” Jean shrugs. I watch Kat take the picture, and I understand exactly what she’s doing. Not documenting. Witnessing.
Anna asks, “And your current husband doesn’t mind?”
“I wouldn’t be the same person without having loved him.”
Jean disappears back into the restaurant and the three of us sit sipping our wine. Well, two of us do. Anna is openly crying. I hand her a napkin. Kat is staring at the table with the expression she gets when something has rearranged something inside her. I reach under the table and take her hand. She doesn’t look at me. She just squeezes back.
The owners join us eventually, toasting Jean and asking about Kat’s pictures. She moves through the restaurant, finding its story the way she does. I watch her do a series of portraits of the staff. There’s a small girl who keeps touching the rolls and delivering the largest ones to the tables, skipping over the uneven patio, singing in a hybrid of French and English.
Anna leans over to me. “She’s good.”
“Yeah.” I say it quieter than I mean to. “She is.”
Anna looks at me for a long moment in that Anna way where she’s deciding whether to say the thing. She says it. “Are you in love with her?”
I look at Kat across the restaurant. She’s crouching down to take a picture of the little girl, and the girl is completely unaware of the camera and completely perfect in that unawareness.
“Working on it,” I say.
Anna pats my hand. “Work faster.”
I look at her sideways. I don’t know her well, but enough. “Tell me you’re working on stepping away from a man who doesn’t deserve you.”
She says nothing but looks off. I simply say, “Work faster.”
After many hugs and kisses, we set off for the hotel. Anna walks slightly ahead of us scrolling her phone, bags looped over both arms. Kat falls into step beside me. The street is narrow and lamp-lit and she bumps her shoulder into mine.
“What are you thinking about?” she asks.
“Jean.”
“Me too.”
I take her hand. We walk like that the rest of the way back, not talking, and it’s the most natural thing that’s happened to me. At the hotel door, Anna disappears inside with a pointed look at me over Kat’s head that I choose to ignore.
Kat stops. Pulls out her phone. “I need to show you something.” She pulls up a text thread and hands it to me. Her last text reads:
KAT: Mom — Despite what we both might think, I love you.
That’s it. Nothing below it.
