The House at Belle Fontaine by Lily Tuck

Author:Lily Tuck
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2013-04-02T16:00:00+00:00

The accident occurred when Leslie was thirty-one. Leslie was on her way home after she had been drinking several whiskey sours at a bar in town called the Buena Vista, and the road was icy because, earlier that evening, it had snowed. Leslie was driving too fast, and her car skidded out of control around a corner and hit a tree. She was killed instantly. Alison only learned about Leslie’s death several months later while she was buying a newspaper at a kiosk in the Gare de Lyon.

“Alison! Hello!” A man called out to her. “It’s Anders. Remember? Janine’s husband. Ex-husband.” He laughed. Anders’s hair had gone gray and he had grown a beard, which was also gray. Alison would never have recognized him.

“I always felt sorry for her,” Alison told Anders.

Anders shook his head. “She seemed to be having a pretty good time screwing Mark in your—” Anders stopped himself. “Hey. I thought you knew. I thought that was why you and Mark got divorced.”

In her seat in the first-class section of the train, on her way to visit Bernadette, whose house is located in a small hilltop village called Pierrefeu, near Toulon, Alison was surprised, after all these years, at how shocked and duped she felt.

Outside, it was drizzling. “Bastard,” she repeated. The train picked up speed, and suddenly before she had a chance to realize it, they were already in the country. They passed a thick forest of trees, then an open field dotted with red poppies, then more fields filled with sunflowers.

She and Leslie had gone shopping together again, and that last time Leslie had let Alison buy her clothes. A black polka-dot party dress with a full skirt and a bit of a plunging neckline. By then it was late spring and the end of the school year and Leslie had lost weight; her complexion had cleared up. At home, when she showed off the new dress, Mark had twirled her around the living room, making the polka-dot skirt flare out. He promised her that all the boys were going to fall in love her.

The sun was trying to come out, and the sunflowers appeared a bright, almost unnatural neon yellow, their heads all nodding in the same direction. In the distance, Alison saw a village, a church, a large turreted house surrounded by a stone wall, then more fields filled with sunflowers, then fields with cattle and horses. Everything looked green and fresh and well cared for. Not slowing down, the train went hurtling by a row of white houses. Behind the lowered barrier, Alison could see the stopped cars, a man on a tractor, some children waving at the train. From where she sat, Alison waved back, but she was too late.

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