eleven

JUNE 2019

LIV

Liv woke at midnight to the sound of strangers’ laughter in the hall outside the hotel suite and realized she had fallen asleep on the couch in the parlor. She sat up with a start and fumbled her way in a panic to Grandma Edith’s door, which was closed. She quietly cracked it open and breathed an audible sigh of relief when she saw her grandmother sleeping soundly there among a pile of fluffy white pillows. The older woman had obviously come back while Liv slept and hadn’t bothered to wake her. Liv closed the door and crept into her own bedroom, but after she had washed her face and changed into pajamas, it took a long time to fall back asleep, her annoyance at her grandmother’s mysteriousness simmering just beneath the surface.

“Where were you last night?” Liv asked when Grandma Edith finally emerged into the parlor, already fully dressed, just before ten the next morning.

Grandma Edith hesitated before dropping her gaze. “Watch your tone, Olivia,” she said mildly. “Perhaps you forget that I’m a grown woman who has the right to come and go when and where she pleases.”

“I never said you didn’t,” Olivia shot back, aware that she sounded like a sullen teenager. “I was just worried about you. You said you didn’t feel well, and then you vanished.”

“Yes, well, here in France we believe in the benefit of a walk from time to time.”

“But you didn’t tell me you were going out.”

Her grandmother opened the suite’s small refrigerator. “I assumed you would piece that together when you noticed I was no longer here. I see you didn’t use any of your time alone to go to the market. That would have been nice.”

“You wanted me to go grocery shopping?”

“First of all, no one calls them grocery stores here.” Grandma Edith closed the refrigerator door. “Secondly, are you telling me you did not leave the hotel? In a city you’ve never been to before?”

“I wanted to be here when you came back.” She glared at her grandmother. “By the way, your attorney dropped by with some paperwork.”

Grandma Edith’s head snapped up. “My attorney?”

“Ah, finally a reaction,” Liv muttered. “Yes. Julien Cohn. You’ve been with his family’s law firm for seventy years? In Reims, a city you’ve never once mentioned? Do you want to tell me what this is all about?”

“Not particularly.” Grandma Edith scratched her arm and gazed out the window. “But I suppose I’ll have to at some point. That’s the reason we’re here, isn’t it?”

“What’s the reason we’re here?”

Grandma Edith didn’t answer. Instead, she strode toward her room. “Get dressed, Olivia. I have a call to make, and then we’re going out.”

? ? ?

“He’s handsome, isn’t he?”

They were the first words Grandma Edith had uttered since leading Liv out of the hotel and onto the bustling street. Liv glanced around but saw no one particularly notable, except perhaps for a silver-haired man sipping coffee at a table outside a blue-awninged café to their right. “Him?” she asked.

“What? No!” Her grandmother looked scandalized. “I was talking about Julien Cohn. Obviously. I hoped you had not lost all sense of good taste after your divorce.”

Liv narrowed her eyes, but Grandma Edith just smiled innocently.

“Well?”

“Does it matter?” Liv thought of Julien’s wedding ring. “So is that it? You’ve dragged me to Reims to look at unavailable, handsome men for the purpose of evaluating my sanity?”

“So you admit he is handsome, then?”

Liv shrugged. “Well . . . yes, of course. My divorce just made me single—not blind.”

“Then there is hope for you yet. Now, here we are.”

Grandma Edith stopped abruptly in front of a brasserie on a side street, and Liv looked up. “?‘Brasserie Moulin,’?” Liv read aloud, and her grandmother nodded, but she didn’t go in. Instead, she stood frozen on the sidewalk, her eyes suddenly glassy. Though it was still early, the tables outside were already packed with people talking, laughing, enjoying their coffees and their glasses of champagne. Liv’s mouth watered as a waiter bustled by with a steaming basket of pommes frites.

“It has hardly changed,” Grandma Edith murmured, more to herself than to Liv. She took a small, tentative step forward, but her knees buckled, and Liv grabbed her elbow just in time to keep her from falling.

“Grandma Edith! Are you all right?”

Grandma Edith regained her balance and yanked her arm away. “Of course. Perfectly fine. Well, what are we waiting for?”

Liv followed her grandmother inside, staying close in case the older woman faltered again. As Grandma Edith asked a young, dark-haired waiter for a table in her elegant, clipped French, Liv gazed around.

The brasserie was dark with wood paneling, an expansive bar area, and droplights overhead spilling narrow pools of light into the aisles. The tables matched the wood of the bar, and each was lit with its own small lamp. Though the windows in the front opened to the modern street outside, there was something timeless about the furnishing of the interior, something that made Liv think this place had probably looked the same fifty years ago, maybe even one hundred years ago, as it did today.