Just One Day

“Tax forms,” she explains. “I pay minimum wage, but you’ll get tips. Which reminds me. You keep forgetting to collect yours.” She reaches under the counter for an envelope with my name on it.

I open up the envelope. There’s a wad of cash in there. Easily a hundred dollars. “This is mine?”

She nods. “We pool tips. Everyone gets a cut.”

I run my fingers over the money. The bills snag on my ragged hangnails. My hands are beyond thrashed, but I don’t care because they’re thrashed from my job. Which has earned me this money. I feel something well up inside me that has nothing to do with airplane tickets or Paris trips or money at all, really.

“It’ll go up in the fall,” Babs says. “Summer’s our slow season.”

I hesitate. “That’s great. Except I won’t be here in the fall.”

She wrinkles her red brows. “But I just broke you in.”

I feel bad, guilty, but it was right there on my resume, the first line—Objective: To obtain short-term employment. Of course, Babs never read my resume.

“I go to college,” I explain.

“We’ll work around your schedule. Gillian’s a student too. And Nathaniel, on and off.”

“In Boston.”

“Oh.” She pauses. “Oh, well. I think Gordon’s coming back after Labor Day.”

“I’m hoping to leave by the end of July. But only if I can save two thousand dollars by then.” And as I say it, I do the math. More than a hundred bucks a week in tips, plus wages—I actually might be able to pull it off.

“Saving for a car?” she asks absentmindedly. She takes another swig of her vodka. “You can buy mine. That beast’ll be the death of me.” Babs drives an ancient Thunderbird.

“No. I’m saving for Paris.”

She puts her bottle down. “Paris?”

I nod.

“What’s in Paris?”

I look at her. I think of him for the first time in a while. In the craziness of the kitchen, he became a little abstract. “Answers.”

She shakes her head with such vehemence her auburn curls come loose from her bandanna. “You can’t go to Paris looking for answers. You have to go looking for questions—or, at the very least, macarons.”

“Macaroons? The coconut things?” I think of the gross cookie replacements we eat on Passover.

“Not macaroons. Macarons. They’re meringue cookies in pastel colors. They are edible angel’s kisses.” She looks at me. “You need two thousand bucks by when?”

“August.”

She narrows her eyes at me. They’re always a little bit bloodshot, though, oddly, more so at the beginning of a shift than at the end, when they take on a sort of manic gleam. “I’ll make you a deal. If you don’t mind working some doubles for weekend brunch, I’ll make sure you earn your two grand by July twenty-fifth, which is when I close the restaurant for two weeks for my summer vacation. On one condition.”

“Which is?”

“Every day in Paris, you eat a macaron. They have to be fresh, so no buying a pack and eating one a day.” She stops and closes her eyes. “I ate my first macaron in Paris on my honeymoon. I’m divorced now, but some loves are enduring. Especially if they happen in Paris.”

A tiny chill prickles up my neck. “Do you really believe that?” I ask her.

She takes a slug of vodka, her eyes glinting knowingly. “Ahh, it’s those kind of answers you’re after. Well, I can’t help you with that, but if you hustle into the walk-in and find the buttermilk and the cream, I can give you the answer to the proverbial question of how to make the perfect creme fraiche.”

Twenty-seven

JUNE

Home

Intro to French runs three days a week for six weeks, from eleven thirty to one, giving me yet another reason to be out of the House of Disapproval. Though I’m at Cafe Finlay five nights a week these days, and all day on weekends, on weekdays, I still don’t go in until five. And the restaurant is closed on Monday and Tuesday, so there’s a lot of dead time for Mom and me to avoid each other in.

On the first day of class, I arrive a half hour early and grab an iced tea from the little kiosk and find the classroom and start looking through my book. There’s lots of pictures of France, many from Paris.

The other students start to filter in. I expected college kids, but everyone except me is my parents’ age. One woman with frosted blond hair plops down at the desk next to mine and introduces herself as Carol and offers me a piece of gum. I gladly accept her handshake but decline the gum—it doesn’t seem very French to chew gum in class.

A birdlike woman with cropped gray hair strides in. She looks like she stepped out of a magazine in her tight linen pencil skirt and little silk blouse, both perfectly pressed, which seems impossible, given the ninety percent humidity outside. Plus, she’s wearing a scarf, also strange, given the ninety percent humidity.

Clearly, she is French. And if the scarf wasn’t a giveaway, then there’s the fact that she marches up to the front of the room and starts speaking. In French.

“Are we in the wrong class?” Carol whispers. Then the teacher goes to the board and writes her name, Madame Lambert, and the name of the class, Intro to French. She also writes it in French. “Oh, no such luck,” Carol says.

Madame Lambert turns to us and in the thickest accent imaginable tells us in English that this is beginning French, but that the best way to learn French is to speak and hear it. And that is about the only English I hear for the next hour and a half.

“Je m’appelle Therese Lambert,” she says, making it sound like this: Teh-rez. Lomb-behr. “Comment vous appelez-vous?”

The class stares at her. She repeats the question, gesturing to herself, then pointing to us. Still no one answers. She rolls her eyes and does this clicking with her teeth. She points to me. Clicks again, gestures for me to stand up. “Je m’appelle Therese Lambert,” she repeats, enunciating slowly and tapping her chest. “Comment t’appelles-tu?”

I stand there for a second frozen, feeling like it’s Celine again jabbering away at me disdainfully. Madame Lambert repeats the question. I get that she’s asking me my name. But I don’t speak French. If I did, I wouldn’t be here. In Intro to French.

But she’s just waiting now. She’s not letting me sit down.

“Je m’appelle Allyson?” I try.

She beams, as though I’ve just explained the origins of the French Revolution, in French. “Bravo! Enchantee, Allyson.”

And she goes around the class asking everyone else’s name the same way.

That was round one. Then comes round two: “Pourquoi voulez-vous apprendre le francais?”

She repeats the question, writing it down on the board, circling certain words and writing their English translations. Pourquoi: why. Apprendre: learn. Voulez-vous: do you want. Oh, I see. She’s asking why we want to learn French.

I have no clue how to begin to answer that. That’s why I’m here.

But then she continues.

“Je veux apprendre le francais parce que . . .” She circles Je veux: I want. Parce que: because. She repeats it three times. Then points to us.