Fresh Water for Flowers by Valérie Perrin

Author:Valérie Perrin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2020-05-22T13:01:36+00:00

57.

Fate followed its path but

it never separated our hearts.

JUNE 1996, GENEVIÈVE MAGNAN.

I’m so sensitive that whenever I read or hear the word “sour,” my tongue hurts and my eyes sting. I burn all over. That’s what I tell myself when I see an ad for sour candies on the TV. “You’re too sensitive,” my mother would spit at me, between wallops.

Must be a balance thing: since my soul’s had it, worth only feeding to strays, my body makes up for it.

I change the channel. If only I could change life by flicking my remote. Since I’ve been unemployed, I’m slumped in my old armchair, not knowing what to do. Telling myself that nothing matters. That it’s over. That they can’t go back on it. That the matter’s closed. They’re dead. They’re buried.

I was asleep when Swan Letellier phoned me. He left me a message I couldn’t understand, his words were confused, he was in a right panic, everything gets jumbled up in his bird brain. I had to listen to it several times to make any sense of his words: Léonine Toussaint’s mother was waiting for him outside the restaurant where he works as a cook, she seems crazy, she doesn’t believe that the girls went into the kitchen to make themselves hot chocolate that night.

After the trial, I thought I’d never hear mention of Léonine ever again. Just like I’d never hear mention of Anaïs, Océane, and Nadège ever again. Thankfully, it was her, the boss, who got all the blame. Two years in the pen. About time the rich faced the shit, about time for a bit of justice, now and then. Never could stand her, that one, all holier-than-thou.

Léonine Toussaint’s mother . . . The families weren’t from around here. It’s only middle-class types who send their brats to dip their bums in the lake of a château. I thought the parents were just ticking the cemetery-visit box when they came to our parts, and that they hurried back home once they’d left flowers and crucifixes on their kids’ tombs.

What’s she after? What does she want? Is she going to come to my place? Is she going to ask around? Letellier’s panicking, I’m not, I stopped being afraid of anyone ages ago.

There were six of us at the château. Letellier, Croquevieille, Lindon, Fontanel, Petit, and me.

Thinking back on all that, it reminds me of the first time I saw him. Not the last, the first. Usually, I think of the last. And I have hatred burning in my veins, like rivers of sour candies.

The first time, it was an end-of-year party for the local nursery schools. I had sick on my shirt, milk reflux from my youngest, who’d been suffering due to the heat. I’d opened it up a little, so people wouldn’t see the stain. He didn’t look at me, he just glanced down at my nursing bra. I trembled. The look of a randy dog. He made me want him. Bad.

He didn’t see me, but me, “I had eyes only for him,” as the rich would say.

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