The French War Bride by Robin Wells

Author:Robin Wells
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-06-29T15:17:46+00:00

35

AMÉLIE

2016

I open the door at eight o’clock the next morning and there is Kat. I have not slept well. The old days have been piling on me like hay bales in a barn. “Back again, I see.”

She gives me her wide-eyed beauty queen look. “You never doubted I would come, did you?”

I had not—not for a second. But for some reason, I don’t want to give her the satisfaction of saying so. I lift my shoulders. “You could have changed your mind.”

“Why? Because I don’t want my ears worn out before you tell me what I want to know?”

Mon Dieu, but she is hard to be nice to! And here I have made up my mind to be kinder. I lay awake last night berating myself for not being more empathetic, more understanding.

“Actually, I thought that perhaps you wouldn’t want to spend a second day in my company.” It is hard to admit it—I have trouble with admissions, it seems—but I knew I was being difficult yesterday. I was not getting what I wanted from her, and that made me resentful. It also made me furious with myself; why am I seeking anything from this woman?

And what is it that I want from her? Understanding, I suppose. Understanding and forgiveness. Haven’t I learned, in my ninety-three years on earth, to depend on no one’s opinion but my own? Apparently not. Alas, we are all doomed to want the validation of others, up until we draw our very last breath.

“I came because I need to know what happened,” she says stiffly.

“I know. And you deserve the truth.”

She looks at me as if it is a trick. Being nice to her is a strategy that throws her for a loop, I see. Perhaps I should have tried it sooner.

“Come in, come in.” I step back and hold the door wide. “Would you like a coffee? Or a tea?”

“Some water would be nice.”

I go to the kitchen and pull a glass from the cabinet.

“Don’t you have bottled water?” she asks.

Bottled water? When fresh clean water flows from a tap? How silly. Besides, she has cancer anyway. “No. Sorry.”

All the same, I put ice in her glass—Americans always like their ice—and I use the filtered water from the refrigerator door, although the tap is faster. As I turn to head back to the living room, I see that she has settled in my chair.

I swallow back a burst of resentment. I offered her the chair to start with yesterday, had I not?

“I hope you don’t mind,” she says. “My back is a bit sore from the couch.”

Of course I mind, when she puts it as a criticism of my sofa’s comfort. Who on earth wouldn’t? I blow out a little sigh. “Not at all,” I lie, and move my coffee cup from the side table by the chair to the coffee table in front of the sofa.

“I could not sleep last night, thinking of how you deceived us about that baby.”

Now that I look at her closely, I realize that she is fairly bristling with outrage.

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