Queen of Babble

18

Igot the rust stains out.

I know. I can barely believe it myself. I’m standing in the kitchen of Chateau Mirac early the next morning, having soaked the gown overnight in my room, then hurried downstairs-seemingly at the crack of dawn, but a glance at my cell phone tells me it’s only eight-to rinse it in the kitchen sink, which is much wider than the one in the bathroom across the hall from my room.

I swear that’s the only reason. It has nothing to do with my fearing Dominique might find me there and demand I hand the dress over to her now that it’s saved.

Really. Nothing to do with that.

Saved, but still not perfect. I have to mend the torn strap and the jaggedy parts along the hem, plus give the thing a supergood ironing when it finally dries.

But I did it. I got the rust stains out.

It’s a French miracle.

I’m gazing at the dress with rapturous self-satisfaction when I hear someone behind me say, “You did it!”

And I nearly have a heart attack, I’m so startled.

“GOD!” I cry, spinning around to find a smiling Luke in the doorway, looking excited. “What are you trying to do, kill me?”

“Sorry,” Luke says, “I didn’t mean to scare you. But…you did it! The stains are gone!”

My heart is hammering a mile a minute-but I have to admit it’s not just because he startled me. It’s also because he looks so gorgeous in the morning light. His freshly shaved face is still glowing a little pinkly from whatever he uses as aftershave (I suspect plain alcohol, since he doesn’t smell like anything in particular, except clean), and the ends of his dark hair are curling damply against the collar of his blue polo shirt. He’s got on those jeans again-the ones he was wearing the first time I met him, the Levi’s that fit his butt so perfectly, not too snug, but not too loose, either. He looks like something dropped from a helicopter-you know, the perfect guy, for a needy girl trapped on a desert island.

That girl being me, and the desert island being my life.

Except, of course, he isn’t mine.

A fact about which he is undoubtedly vastly relieved, I realize, when I see his gaze going from the gown I’m holding to the clothes I’m wearing-which happen to be my Sears jeans and Run Katie Run T-shirt.

Well, Mrs. Thibodaux had been pretty explicit about what we’d be doing all day-setting up tables and chairs in preparation for tomorrow’s wedding. I don’t want to get one of my nice dresses dirty.

Plus I couldn’t be bothered with my hair this morning, so it’s piled into a ponytail coming out of the top of my head. At least I have makeup on. Some, anyway. Enough to keep my eyes from looking piglike.

“Cream of tartar works, huh?” is all Luke says, though, as his gaze goes from me back to the dress. Which is something of a relief. I get positively jumpy when those dark brown eyes turn in my direction.

“It sure does,” I say, giving the gown a satisfied flick. “Of course, it doesn’t always work this fast. Sometimes you have to go through multiple soakings. I don’t think that gun could have been there that long. The grease and rust didn’t really set in that deeply. Now I just need to mend and iron it, and it’ll be as good as new. Whoever it belongs to is going to be stoked to get it back good as new.”

Luke grins. “I think tracing its ownership is going to be a tad difficult. We’ve had a lot of guests here over the past few centuries.”

“Well, this one probably stayed here sometime in the past few decades,” I say. “I’m thinking late sixties, early seventies. Though, I grant you, with Givenchy it’s hard to tell. His lines are so classic…he really isn’t influenced by the vagaries of popular trends.”

Luke’s grin broadens. “The vagaries of popular trends?”

I blush. “I thought that sounded good.”

“Oh, it did. You’ve got me convinced. So. Want to come with me to get the croissants?”

I stare at him. “Croissants?”

“Yeah. For breakfast. I’m going into town to the bakery now, to get them before everybody wakes up and comes downstairs, whining for breakfast. I know you haven’t seen Sarlat and I think you’ll like it. Want to come with me?”

If he’d asked me if I wanted to go to Family Day at the local Gap, where all Gap employees give their friends and relatives thirty-five percent off all Gap products-which is basically my idea of hell on earth-I would have wanted to come with him. That’s how far gone I am about him.

Except, of course, for that one trifling detail.

“Um,” I say, “where’s Dominique?”

I feel like that’s a nice, neutral way to ask if his girlfriend is going along, too. Without coming right out and asking it that way. Because “Is your girlfriend coming?” might sound as if I don’t like her, or that I only want to go if I can get him alone, or something like that. Which isn’t true. At all.

Although if she is coming along, I might find something else I have to do instead. Just because having to sit and watch the two of them together isn’t really high on my list of fun things to do while on vacation in the south of France.

“She’s still sleeping,” Luke says. “Little too much champagne with Mom last night.”

“Oh,” I say, keeping my expression carefully neutral. “Well, just let me hang this to dry. And I’ll be right back.”

“I’ll be out in the car,” Luke says, indicating the back door to the kitchen, in front of which the butter-colored convertible is parked.

I run like the wind. I hang the dress from the peg (what servants used for their uniforms in the olden days?) on my wall, with the bucket underneath to catch the drips.

Then I grab my purse and tear back downstairs.

Luke is sitting behind the wheel. There is no one else in the car. Around us, the morning air smells as fresh as newly folded laundry, and the sun, already getting hot, feels delicious on my skin. It’s completely quiet except for birdsong and the huffing of Patapouf, the basset hound, who has come sniffing around the back kitchen door in hopes of getting some handouts.

“Ready?” Luke asks me with a smile.

And, despite all my best efforts, my heart bursts right out of my chest and flies around my head on little cherub wings. Just like in a cartoon.

“Yes,” I say to him in what I think sounds like a perfectly normal voice-considering the fact that my heart is twittering around and around my head-and hurry to slide into the front passenger seat.

I am so, so dead.

But so what? I’m on vacation! It’s okay to have a little crush. In fact, it’s better to have a crush on Luke, who is safely taken, than it would be to have one on, say, Blaine. Because I might actually end up hooking up with Blaine, who is available, and that would be very emotionally risky, considering my fragile state of rebound.

No, it’s fine that I have a crush on Luke. He’s safe. Because nothing will come of it. Nothing at all.

The ride down the same driveway it took us so long to climb up the night before last is hilariously bouncy. I have to hang on to keep from being thrown around the massive front seat. But Luke and Chaz really did do a good job cutting the tree branches back-none of them whip at us.

And then suddenly we’re bursting out of the trees onto the same road along the river that we’d traveled from the train station the other night…but that had been in the dark. Seeing the river up close for the first time in daylight, I can’t help gasping.

“It’s so beautiful!” I cry. Because it is. A sun-dappled, gently flowing river, with wide, grassy banks, over which tall oak trees tower, their leafy branches providing bathers and rafters with welcome shade.

“The Dordogne,” Luke explains. “I used to go rafting on it when I was a kid. Although that makes it sounds like there are rapids, which there aren’t, really. We’d go down it on inflatable tires. It’s a nice, lazy ride.”

Impressed by so much natural beauty, I shake my head. “Luke, I don’t get how you can go back to Houston when you have all this.”

Luke laughs and says, “Well, much as I love my dad, I don’t exactly want to live with him.”

“No,” I say mournfully. “Neither does your mom, I guess.”

“He drives her crazy,” Luke agrees. “She thinks all he cares about is his wine. When he’s here, all he does is fuss over his vines, and when he’s back in Texas, with her, all he ever did was worry about them.”

“But he loves her so much,” I say. “I mean, can’t she tell that? He can barely take his eyes off her.”

“I guess she needs more than that,” Luke says. “Some kind of proof that when she’s not around, he thinks about her, too. And not just his grapes.”

I’m mulling this over when we turn a corner and I see the Laurents’ millhouse-with Madame Laurent outside, watering the explosion of blossoms in her arbored garden.

“Oh!” I cry. “It’s Agnes’s mom!” I wave. “Bonjour! Bonjour, madame!”

Madame Laurent looks up from her flowers and waves back, smiling, as we whiz past.

“Well,” Luke says, glancing at me with a grin, “you’re certainly in a good mood this morning.”

“Oh,” I say, sinking back into my seat in embarrassment over my excitement at seeing the Chateau Mirac cook in her own habitat. “This place is so beautiful. And I’m just. So happy. To be here.”

With you, I almost add. But for once, I manage to shut my mouth before it runs away with me.

“I suspect,” Luke says, making a turn toward the high-walled city I’d seen perched up on a cliff the night I’d arrived, “that you’re the kind of person who’s in a good mood wherever you are. Except when you’ve just discovered your boyfriend is a welfare cheat,” he adds with a wink.

I smile a little queasily back at him, still feeling mortified. Of all the people I had to open my big mouth to about my romantic problems, why did it have to be him?

But a second later, as we enter the city of Sarlat, I forget my chagrin at the sight of all the red geraniums spilling down from window boxes above my head; the narrow cobblestoned streets; the villagers, hurrying along to the open-air market with their baskets filled with baguettes and vegetables. It’s like a movie-set version of a French medieval village-only it isn’t a movie set. It’s a real medieval village!

And I’m right in the middle of it!

Luke pulls up in front of a quaint old shop with the word boulangerie written in gold on the large front window and from which the smell of freshly baked bread wafts, causing my stomach to growl hungrily.

“Do you mind waiting in the car?” Luke asks. “That way I don’t have to find a parking space. It’ll just take a second, I already phoned in the order. I just have to pick it up.”

“Pas un probleme,” I say, which I think means “Not a problem.” I guess I’m right since Luke smiles and hurries inside.

Still, my grasp of French is put to the test a second later when a carefully dressed old woman approaches the car and begins babbling to me a mile a minute. The name “Jean-Luc” is the only word I recognize.

“Je suis desolee, madame,” I begin to say, which means “I’m sorry.” I think. “Mais je ne parle pas francais-”

Before the words are all the way out of my mouth, the old woman is saying, in French-accented English, looking scandalized, “But I understood Jean-Luc’s petite amie was French!”

At least I know what the words petite amie mean.

“Oh, I’m not Jean-Luc’s girlfriend,” I say hastily. “I’m just a friend. I’m staying at Mirac for a little while. He’s inside picking up some croissants-”

The old woman looks infinitely relieved. “Oh!” she says, laughing. “I recognized the car, you see, and I just assumed…you must forgive me. That was quite a shock. For Jean-Luc not to marry a Frenchwoman…it would be quite a scandal!”

I take in the woman’s carefully knotted scarf-obviously Hermes-and light wool suit (she must be broiling in this heat) and say, “You must be a friend of Monsieur de Villiers, then?”

“Oh, I have known Guillaume for years. It was very shocking to all of us when he married that woman from Texas. Tell me”-the old woman narrows her perfectly made-up eyes-“is she there now? Madame de Villiers? At Chateau Mirac? I heard a rumor she was…”

“Um,” I say. “Well, yes. Her niece is getting married there tomorrow, and-”

“Madame Castille,” Luke says as he comes out of the bakery with two large paper bags in his arms. “What a pleasure.” His smile, though, doesn’t reach his eyes.

“Oh, Jean-Luc,” the old woman says, beaming with pleasure at the sight of him (well, who wouldn’t?).

And then she launches into a torrent of French against which Luke, I can tell, feels defenseless. Which is why I say, when Madame Castille pauses for breath, “Uh, Luke? Hadn’t we better get back? People are going to be waking up and wanting their breakfast.”

“Right,” Luke says quickly. “We have to go, madame. It was lovely seeing you. I’ll give my father your best, don’t worry.”

It isn’t until we’ve pulled away that Luke gives a mighty exhalation and says, “Thanks for that. I thought she was going to talk all day.”

“She’s a big fan of yours,” I say with cautious nonchalance. “She thought I was your girlfriend and she about had a heart attack that I wasn’t French. She said it will be a big scandal if you don’t marry a French girl. It was a big scandal when your dad married your mom, apparently.”

Luke throws the car into gear with more force than is strictly necessary. “The only person who was scandalized was her. She’s been after my dad since they were kids. Now that he and my mom are on the rocks, she can’t wait for the chance to sink her claws into him.”

“But it won’t work,” I say, “because your dad still loves your mom. Right?”

“Right,” Luke says. “Although I could see the old guy marrying that witch just to get her off his back. Oh, here. I got you something.” He pokes the bag of heavenly scented croissants that sits between us.

“A croissant?” I ask, opening up the bag. A wave of yeasty steam hits me. They’re still warm from the oven. “Thanks!” I decide not to mention anything about my carb-free diet. I’ve pretty much given up on that since those rolls on the train down here, anyway.

“Not that bag,” Luke says, looking at me like I’m crazy. “The other one.”

I notice a smaller bag behind the one containing the croissants and open it.

And my eyes nearly pop out of my head.

“Wha-” I gasp. I am, for only the second time in my life, speechless. “How-how did you know?”

“Chaz said something about it,” Luke says.

I pull the six-pack-glistening with moisture-from the bag and stare at it.

“They’re…they’re still cold,” I say wonderingly.

“Well,” Luke says a little dryly, “yes. I know Sarlat looks old, but they do have refrigeration.”

I know it’s ridiculous. But my eyes have actually filled with tears. I do my best to blink them away. I don’t want him to know that I’m crying with joy over the fact that he’s given me a six-pack of diet Coke. Because I’m not. It’s the gesture, not the beverage.

“Th-thank you,” I say. I know I need to keep the conversation short, or he’ll hear the tremor in my voice. “D-do you want one?”

“You’re welcome,” Luke says. “And no, thank you. I prefer to get my caffeine the old-fashioned way, with a Colombian drip. So. What have you decided?”

I’ve taken one of the cans from the plastic holder and am about to crack it open. “Decided?”

“About what you’re going to do,” Luke says. “When you get back to the States. Are you going to stay in Ann Arbor? Or move to New York?”

“Oh.” I crack open the can. The sharp hiss of carbonation is every bit as musical to my ears as the burble of the river to my left. “I don’t know. I want to move to New York. You know, with Shari. But what would I do there?”

“In New York?”

“Right. I mean, let’s face it. It turns out there’s not a whole lot you can do with an individualized major in history of fashion. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Oh,” Luke says with a mysterious smile, “I’m pretty sure you’ll figure something out.”

“Right,” I say-very sarcastically. I mean, for me, anyway. “And then there’s the small fact that I haven’t exactly graduated yet. How can I find a job if I don’t even have my B.A. yet?”

“Well,” Luke says, “I think that depends on the job.”

“I don’t know,” I say. And take a sip of my diet Coke. The bubbles from the carbonation tickle my tongue. God, I’ve missed this. “It might just be simpler to stay in Ann Arbor for one last semester.”

“Right,” Luke says. “And see if you can patch things up with what’s-his-name.”

I am so shocked by this I nearly spit out the diet Coke I’ve just swallowed. Yes! Nearly one of sixteenth of one my six precious cans!

“WHAT?” I cry after I swallow. “Patch things up with-what are you TALKING about?”

“Just checking,” Luke says. “I mean, you say you want to stay in Ann Arbor…and he’ll be in Ann Arbor. Right?”

“Well, yeah,” I say. “But that’s not why. I mean, at least in Ann Arbor I still have my job at the shop. I could live at home and save up my money, then join Shari in January.” If she hasn’t already found another roommate.

“That,” Luke says as he turns the car up the driveway to Mirac, “doesn’t sound much like the girl I met on the train the other day, the one who took off for France without even knowing if she’d have a place to stay when she got there.”

“I knew I’d have a place to stay,” I say. “I mean, I knew Shari was here somewhere. I knew I wouldn’t be alone.”

“Just like you wouldn’t be alone in New York,” Luke says.

I laugh. “Oh, you’re one to talk,” I say. “Why aren’t you moving to New York? You told me you got into NYU.”

“Yeah,” Luke says as we bounce along the steep driveway. “But I don’t know if that’s really what I want to do. I mean, give up my six-figure salary for five more years of school?”

“Oh, you’d rather help rich people figure out how to make more money than save lives?”

“Ouch,” Luke says with a grin.

I shrug. Or as best I can when I’m being jounced around so much and am also trying to protect the precious elixir in the can I’m holding. “I’m just saying. I mean, managing stock portfolios is important. But if it turns out what you’re actually good at is healing sick people, isn’t it kind of a waste not to do that instead?”

“But that’s just it,” Luke says. “I don’t know if I am. Good at healing sick people, I mean.”

“Just like I don’t know if there’s anything I’m good at that someone in New York will actually pay me to do.”

“But,” he says, “as a certain person keeps telling me, you’ll never know if you don’t even give it a try.”

Then we’re bursting out of the trees again and onto the circular drive that leads to the house. It’s even more impressive, it turns out, in daylight than it is at nighttime.

Not that Luke seems to notice. I guess because he’s seen it so many times already.

“That’s different,” I say. “I mean, you already know there’s something you can do. Someone’s paying you a six-figure salary to do it. You know how much I get paid? I get eight bucks an hour at Vintage to Vavoom. You know how far eight bucks an hour goes in New York City? Well, I don’t, either. But I’m guessing not very far.”

Luke, I notice when I glance nervously his way to see what he thinks of my admission, is grinning more broadly than ever.

“Is this how you are with everybody?” he wants to know. “Or am I just lucky because, in a moment of weakness, you revealed all your deepest secrets to me?”

“You promised not to tell anyone about those,” I remind him. “Especially Shari, about the thesis-”

“Hey,” Luke says, pulling up in front of the chateau. His gaze is steady on mine. He’s not smiling anymore. “I said I wouldn’t tell. Remember? And I’m not going to. You can trust me.”

And for a second-while we sit there looking at each other across the bag of croissants-I can swear that something…happens…between us.

I don’t know what. But it’s different from all the times I thought he was going to kiss me. There’s nothing sexual about what happens there in the car. It’s more like some sort of…mutual understanding. Some sort of acknowledgment that we are spiritual kin. Some sort of magnetic pull-

Or maybe it’s just the smell of the croissants. It’s been a really long time since I’ve had any kind of pastry.

Whatever it is that’s going on between Luke and me-if anything-it’s over a second later when the door to the chateau is thrown open and Vicky, standing there in a pale blue kimono, says, “God, what took you so long? We’re all starving. You know I get hypoglycemic if I don’t eat first thing in the morning.”

And the moment between Luke and me-whatever it was-is gone.

“Got your cure for hypoglycemia right here,” Luke says cheerfully, grabbing the bag of croissants.

Then, when Vicky stomps back into the house, Luke turns to me and winks.

“Look at that,” he says. “I’m healing people already.”