Chapter 3 – NOELLE
NOELLE
My father's fridge held half a lemon, a jar of something pickled and forgotten at the back, and three bottles of sparkling water.
I knew this because I'd checked it last Tuesday, made a list in the notes app on my phone, and shown up today with a canvas bag full of things he'd actually eat: chicken thighs already braised, the good bread from the bakery on Rue Clément, a tub of the lentil soup he'd liked when I made it at Christmas.
He wouldn't say he liked it. He'd eat two bowls and say it's a bit thick, isn't it, and I'd say yes, Papa and that would be the end of the compliments.
He was in his chair when I let myself in with my key, reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, newspaper folded to the crossword.
"You're late." He didn't look up.
"I said two o'clock."
"I thought you meant earlier."
I put the bag on the kitchen counter and started unpacking.
The soup into a pot. The chicken into the oven at low heat to warm through.
I found a clean bowl in the second cabinet because the first held things he'd stacked without washing, coffee cups and a plate he'd apparently been rotating for days.
"Papa, you have to actually wash these."
"The woman comes on Thursdays."
"Today is Tuesday."
He made a sound that wasn't agreement or disagreement, just acknowledgement that I'd spoken.
I washed the plates and set the soup to warm and stood at the counter in his small kitchen that smelled of coffee and old newspaper and the particular staleness of a house where one person lived alone and rarely opened a window.
"You look thin," he said from the doorway.
He'd moved without me hearing him. He stood with his arms crossed, looking me over the way he'd looked me over my whole life—searching for something to address.
"I'm the same weight I've always been."
"Those trousers wash you out. You should wear color." He tapped the doorframe once and went back to his chair. "Camille always wears color. She understands what suited her."
I stirred the soup.
The thing about my father was that he didn't mean it as a comparison.
Or he didn't think he did. It came out as observation, the same way someone might note that the weather had turned.
He had two daughters and a mental filing system and Camille had always occupied the category of things that are pleasing while I occupied things that are functional.
He relied on me. He called me first when something broke, when a bill was confusing, when the doctor used a term he didn't understand. He just never thought to call it love.
I ladled soup into the clean bowl, cut two thick slices of bread, and brought it to him on a tray.
"The bread's good," he said, which from him was close to rapturous.
"Rue Clément."
"Expensive."
"Not very."
He ate. I sat in the chair across from him and drank the tea I'd made myself and we existed in the same room in the way we always had, companionable and distant, like two boats moored at the same dock but facing different directions.
The buzzer went at half two.
He pressed the intercom. "Yes?"
"Papa, it's me." Camille's voice, even through the crackle, had that particular softness she kept for him, rounded at the edges and helpless. My sister was many things but helpless was never one of them. "Buzz me up, I'm frozen."
He buzzed her without another word and straightened in his chair. Crossed his feet at the ankle. Set the soup tray aside with a briskness he hadn't applied to anything since I arrived.
Camille came through the door in a camel coat with her dark hair down, cheeks pink from the cold, a silk scarf in exactly the right shade of cream. She looked like an advertisement for having a good life. She always looked like an advertisement for something.
"Papa." She bent and kissed both his cheeks, her hand on his shoulder. Then she turned, and saw me, and the smile shifted a single, imperceptible degree. "Noelle. I didn't know you'd be here."
"I come every Tuesday."
"Of course you do." She unwound her scarf and draped it over the arm of the sofa and looked around the room in the way she had, cataloguing. Her gaze landed on the tray with my father's soup. "What's this?"
"Lentil soup," my father said. "It's good."
"Mm." She sat on the sofa, pulled her knees up sideways, and became instantly the focal point of the room.
Not through effort. Just through presence, the kind I'd watched my whole life and never worked out how to replicate.
"I've had the most terrible morning. Lucien—" Her voice broke, cleanly, and she pressed two fingers to her mouth. "Sorry. I'm sorry, I don't want to?—"
"What did he do?" My father's voice dropped, not a question.
"There are photos, Papa. Online. In the papers." She looked up. Her eyes were wet. Real tears or very good ones; I'd never been able to tell, and I'd had twenty-eight years of practice. "He was with someone. A woman. At some club, and he wasn't even—he didn't even try to hide it."
My father set his jaw. "Camille."
"I know."
"You knew what he was when you ran off with him."
The mildest of rebukes. The gentlest possible I told you so, delivered without heat, and then immediately softened because her chin had already started to tremble.
"I know, Papa. I know I did." She pressed her lips together. "I was young and stupid and I thought—I thought he'd be different with me."
"Yes, well." He reached over and patted her knee. Once, twice. His version of an embrace. "We live and we learn."
She tilted into it. Her eyes slid briefly toward me, something checking, measuring, and then back to him.
"I wouldn't bother you with it, but—" She paused in the way that meant the actual request was arriving.
"Lucien's been at the tables again. I found out this morning, the same morning as all this.
" She gestured vaguely at her face, her distress.
"I don't know what to do, Papa. There's a household bill I can't cover this month and I didn't know who else?—"
"How much?" His hand was already moving toward his cardigan pocket, where he kept the checkbook like other men kept handkerchiefs.
I stood. Took his soup bowl and the tray back to the kitchen because I couldn't watch the next part without letting something show on my face. I ran hot water over the bowl and listened to the low murmur of my father's voice, the scratch of his pen.
I dried the bowl. Put it back in the cabinet. Wiped down the counter.
Camille appeared in the kitchen doorway.
"You don't have to do that," she said. "Rosa will come Thursday."
"I know."
She leaned against the doorframe, fingers curling around the check she'd folded small and put in her coat pocket. Her eyes moved over me the way they'd been doing since I walked in.
"Is that what you wore over here?"
I looked down at my trousers, the ones my father had already dismissed. Dark navy, well-cut, the kind of thing I'd wear on an ordinary Tuesday. "Yes."
"No, they're fine." She waved a hand. The wave was the point. "It's just—you were always so pretty when you made a bit of effort. The Calvelli people must put you in things, surely? Grant has that stylist on retainer for events and God knows he has the money to buy you whatever you want."
There was no mistaking the bitterness in it.
"I'm fine in what I wear."
"Of course you are." She tilted her head. "You always were the low-maintenance one. Grant must appreciate that, honestly. After all the—" She stopped herself. Smiled. "Never mind."
After all the what. After all the effort of wanting someone else. After the difficulty of wanting Camille. After the Calvelli circus that would have required a different kind of wife than the plain capable one who showed up instead.
She didn't finish the sentence. She never finished the sentences. That was the craft of it.
She pushed off the doorframe and went back to the sitting room. I heard her laugh at something my father said, heard him laugh in response, a sound I hadn't heard in the hour I'd been here.
I put on my coat. Picked up my empty canvas bag. Folded it over my arm.
"Papa, the chicken's in the oven. Low heat, twenty minutes." I kissed his cheek. He patted my hand once, already half-turned back toward Camille.
"Drive safe," he said.
Camille was already deep into something else, her voice warm and animated, the checkbook's work complete and forgotten. She raised a hand at me without turning around.
I let myself out and stood in the corridor for a moment with my empty bag and my washed-out trousers and the particular variety of tired that food and effort couldn't touch.
Then I took the stairs down because the lift in this building was slow, and I had a delivery to arrange, and the Martinellis' flowers weren't going to order themselves.