Queen of Babble Gets Hitched

• Chapter 24 •

I find Monsieur Henri in his back garden the next morning, precisely where his wife said he’d be: practicing on his homemade pétanque lane.

He seems surprised to see me.

Well, I don’t suppose it’s often he receives visitors from Manhattan to his suburban Cranbury, New Jersey, home.

Especially while he’s still in his terrycloth bathrobe.

“Elizabeth!” he cries, dropping the pétanque ball in the dust and hurrying to close his robe. He casts an indignant look at his wife, coming up behind us with a tray of iced tea.

“I’m sorry, Jean,” she says. But if you ask me, she doesn’t look the least bit sorry. “Elizabeth phoned earlier this morning to say she was coming with something important to discuss with us. I did call out to you. But I suppose you didn’t hear me.”

Monsieur Henri watches, dumbfounded, as his wife sets the tray down on the small metal table beneath the rose-covered arbor at the end of his pétanque lane, then takes a seat on the bench beside it. Always a large man, her husband has lost a lot of weight since his surgery. But he is still sweating in the summer heat, even in the shade of the arbor. He looks down at the three glasses of iced tea before him.

“Well,” he says. “I suppose I can take a break. For a moment.”

“That would be nice,” I say. I flick a glance toward the house. Chaz is driving around the neighborhood, having assured me he’d be back in half an hour to pick me up in the car we rented from Avis that morning. “I’ll just cruise the strip malls,” he’d said. “Pick you up a thong from Victoria’s Secret. I’ve never seen you in a thong. Or anything from Victoria’s Secret, for that matter.”

There’s a reason for that, I’d assured him.

I take a seat on the bench beside Madame Henri, after carefully tucking my vintage Lilly Pulitzer wraparound skirt beneath me, waiting until Monsieur Henri has lowered himself carefully into the teak Adirondack chair opposite us before I speak.

“I’m so sorry to bother you here at your home, Monsieur Henri,” I say. “But it’s about the building—”

“Now, Elizabeth,” Monsieur Henri says with hearty kindness as he reaches for one of the glasses of iced tea and swirls around the twig of mint his wife has plopped into it. “I really don’t think there’s anything more we can say about that. We’re listing it with Goldmark, and that’s that. I’m very sorry about your having to find another job and an apartment, but like we said, we’ll put in a good word for you with Maurice—you’ll have the best references there are… you’ll have no trouble at all finding a job—and you will just have to be satisfied with that. Really, this begging… it’s not attractive. I’m rather surprised at you, I must say.”

“Actually,” I say, reaching for my own glass of iced tea, pleased to see that my hand isn’t shaking at all as I hold it. Way to go, Lizzie! “I’m not here to beg for my job, Monsieur Henri. I’ve found another job. I’m here to make an offer on your building.”

Monsieur Henri nearly drops the glass he’s holding. Madame Henri chokes a little on the mouthful of iced tea she’s just taken.

“I… I beg your pardon, Elizabeth?” She coughs.

“I know I ought to have gone through your Realtor,” I say quickly. “But the thing is, I don’t have all the money. Yet. But I will. Soon. And the rest I can pay as we go along, but it will have to be over a period of a few years. Which I know isn’t exactly what you were hoping for, but”—I lean forward, speaking to both of them in a low, urgent voice, while somewhere off in the distance, a lawn mower roars to life and a bird begins a plaintive but still melodious song—“the advantage of selling to me, as opposed to some stranger, is that you won’t be paying any Realtor fees. We can cut out the middleman completely, and you’ll be saving yourself hundreds of thousands of dollars. I’m willing to make you an offer right now, here, today, no inspection, no nothing, of four point five million dollars. And before you say you think the building is worth more,” I say, cutting off both of them, since I hear them inhale, “allow me to point out that I live and work there. I don’t need an inspection because I know how much work the place needs. I’ve seen the cracks, plugged up the leaks, called the exterminator myself for the rats down in the basement more times than I can count. And I’m making my offer to you now, today, with my guarantee that you will have the whole amount five years from today. I’ll sign anything you want guaranteeing it. All I ask is that you remember where the two of you were when I first walked through your door a year ago. And where you both are now.”

I lean back against the bench and take a long swig from my iced tea. Even for a talker, I am spent after having given such a long speech. I eye the two of them as they stare uneasily back at me.

Then Madame Henri looks at her husband.

“The Realtor fees are a lot,” she says in French. Even though they both know perfectly well by now that I speak their native language more or less fluently, they still slip back into it when they don’t want me to overhear what they’re saying, out of force of habit. “We could save a lot of money.”

“But we’d have to wait for the money,” her husband says petulantly. “You heard her.”

“So?” his wife demands. “What are you planning on buying? A yacht?”

“Maybe,” Monsieur Henri says with a snort.

“You heard what the inspector said,” Madame Henri says. “About the asbestos in the basement.”

“He also said if we left it alone, it wouldn’t be a problem. All pipes in Manhattan are lined with asbestos.”

I listen to this without blinking. I already know about the asbestos. The plumber told me months ago. I’d planned on using it as leverage if they balked at my offer.

“It’s going to cost thousands to get it removed,” Madame Henri goes on. “Maybe tens of thousands. Do you want that hassle?”

“No,” Monsieur Henri pouts.

“This way,” his wife says, “we can be done with it in an afternoon. We don’t even have to pay to have our things moved out! She’ll keep them!”

Monsieur Henri brightens at this. “Eh! I didn’t think of this! But where’s she getting all this money? She’s not even thirty.”

“Who knows?” his wife asks with a Gallic shrug. “The dead grandmother, perhaps?”

“Ask her,” Monsieur Henri says.

Then they both turn to me. And Madame Henri asks in English, “Did you hear all that?”

“Of course,” I say testily. “I’m not deaf. And I speak French. Remember?”

“I know.” Madame Henri shakes her head. “The money is from your grandmother?”

“No,” I say. “It’s from a deal I made last night with Geck Industries. I’m going to be designing a line of wedding wear for their discount department stores.”

Monsieur Henri looks confused. “But if you are going to work for Geck, then why do you still want the shop?”

“Because I’m still going to be doing gowns for my own customers,” I said. “Independent of Geck. Besides, your shop… my shop, if you’ll agree to sell it to me… it’s home.”

I feel ridiculous, but as I say the word, tears fill my eyes. And yet… it’s true. That pokey little apartment—which I fully intend to renovate if it ever becomes mine—is the place where I’ve known some of the highest highs, and lowest lows, of my life. I can’t let it slip away from me. I won’t. Not without a fight.

Madame Henri blinks a few times. Then she looks at her husband. He arches his eyebrows.

“Well,” Monsieur Henri says. “In that case… I think we have to sell the building to Elizabeth. Do you not agree, chérie?”

Madame Henri’s face breaks into an enormous smile.

“I agree,” she says.

Which is how, a half hour later, I end up drinking champagne in the noonday sun with Madame Henri in her back garden, while the birds chirp all around us, and her husband shows Chaz, who’s returned from his odyssey at the mall, how to play pétanque—a sport at which, it soon becomes apparent, he excels…

Almost as much as he excels in coaching me in how to get my former bosses to sell me their place of business.