The Balcony by Jane Delury

Author:Jane Delury
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2018-03-27T04:00:00+00:00

The boy that she’d loved was named Gabriel. He lived with his parents on a small farm outside of Benneville. Les Italiens, the neighbors called them. She met him the spring she turned fourteen. She had been going to the forest after school to avoid heading home to her mother’s judgments over her hair not being right, the ink stain on the hem of her skirt, her unkempt nails, her general lack of elegance. Meanwhile, Charlotte, with her big eyes and cheeks, was perfect, like the dessert she’d been named for: creamy and sweet and plump. And she didn’t talk, so she couldn’t talk back.

One afternoon, she turned down the trail that led to the stone walls of the old Léger estate and saw a boy jimmying open the lock on the gate with a pocketknife.

“Ne t’inquiète pas,” she said when he turned around. “I haven’t seen anything.” She assumed from the bag over his shoulder that he was poaching rabbits. He had a pale, thin face with full lips, and bushy hair that sprouted from under a cap. He pushed open the gate and took off the cap, gesturing with it for her to pass by.

“It’s ten o’clock,” he said, in broken French. “The widow and her maid have gone to mass and the gardens are open to visitors.”

They met there every afternoon for the next two weeks. They sat in the pergola, under the lacy umbrella of wisteria that kept out a summer rain. They put ivy crowns on the heads of the muses, and tried to hit the chimneys with burrs from the chestnut tree. Gabriel took her to the back wall of the manor and showed her fossils in the stone. She leaned in and licked the curl of a shell, and he did the same.

The third week, he kissed her as they drank from the fountain. By June, they were stripping off their clothes before they’d got through the gate. There was a soft patch of grass near the topiary. After, they’d lie curled up together. He whispered to her in Italian, and she imagined what he must be saying. When they heard the clunking sound of the widow’s car, they grabbed their clothes and ran into the forest.

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