26. Cat
CAT
The three days before Colette arrives are the longest of my life, and I'm not even the one she's coming for.
Iris copes the way Iris copes. By Tuesday she has reorganised the office. By Wednesday she has reorganised the distillery, colour-coded the harvest ledgers, and drawn up a schedule for the goats, who cannot read.
Colette gets to me first.
Mid-morning, Iris out on her run, me elbow-deep in bread dough. My phone goes with an American number and I answer it like an idiot, because I'm expecting the mill about the flour order.
"Catherine Aldridge?"
I know the voice at once. It's Iris's, aged twenty years and drained of everything warm.
"This is Colette Beaumont-Clark. I imagine you know why I'm calling."
"To confirm dinner?"
She doesn't laugh. I didn't expect her to.
"I'll be brief. My daughter has a life in Chicago.
A career. A future she built over thirty years and dismantled in one summer under your roof.
" A pause. "I'm prepared to make this simple.
Name a figure for your half of the property.
My lawyer can have papers drafted by the end of the week.
Iris comes home, this—episode—ends, and everyone recovers what they've lost."
I look at the dough on my hands.
"You're trying to buy the farm," I say.
"I'm trying to buy my daughter's life back. The farm is incidental." Her voice doesn't rise at all, which is somehow the frightening part. "Everyone has a number, Miss Aldridge. Your mother certainly did. She lived on my mother's charity for years—and charity has a long memory in this family."
And there it is. The word parasite, wearing gloves.
"Madame," I say, "I've cooked for people like you my whole career.
Back tables. Private rooms. People who believe everything in the world is for sale—and they're mostly right, and it makes them miserable in ways they can't even locate.
" I take a breath. "There's no number. There was never going to be a number.
And you've just told me everything I need to know about what happened between you and your mother, because you're doing it again—to your daughter, in real time. "
The silence goes on so long I think she's hung up.
"I'll see you at two o'clock," she says at last, and is gone.
I tell Iris the moment she's through the door—sweaty, still catching her breath—because secrets are how this family lost thirty years, and I'm not donating another one.
She goes white. Then a colour I have no name for.
"She called you." Not a question. "She went around me."
"She tested the cheap way in first. It's what I'd do, if I were her and awful."
"What did she offer?"
"Whatever I asked."
"And you said?"
"That there's no number." I shrug, and it doesn't come off half as light as I want it to. "Also several other things. I may have mentioned back tables."
Iris stares at me for a long moment. Then she crosses the kitchen, takes my face in both hands, and kisses me, flour and all.
"Two o'clock," she says grimly, when she lets me go. "I'll alphabetise."
Thursday morning I find her at the kitchen table at half five, in the dark, making a list.
"What's that one?"
"Things she might say." She doesn't look up. "And what I'll say back."
I read over her shoulder. It's in two columns. It's alphabetised.
"You've written counter-arguments."
"Yes."
"To a woman who isn't here."
"Yes."
I take the pen out of her hand, put a coffee in it instead, and start cracking eggs — because there's nothing else I can do for her, and if I don't do something with my hands I'll lose my mind.
"You could just not," I say that night, into the dark. Neither of us is sleeping. "Ring her. Tell her not to come."
"I can't."
"You could. I'd back you. We could put the goat in the drive."
"Cat."
"He'd do it, too. He hates everyone. It's his single finest quality."
She huffs — barely a laugh, but I'll take it — and rolls over to face me.
"If I don't face her, she wins," she says. "She just stays this thing hanging over everything. Weather." Her voice goes small. "And I'm scared that being near her turns me back. Into the girl who did whatever she wanted, to keep the peace."
"It won't."
"How do you—"
"Because that girl wouldn't have alphabetised her counter-arguments." I feel her go still. "She'd have just gone."
Iris laughs — properly, wet and startled — and puts her freezing feet on my legs, which is a war crime, and is asleep inside of forty minutes.
I don't sleep at all.
Colette arrives at precisely two o'clock, because of course she does.
I watch from the kitchen window as the rental car comes up the drive — a sleek black sedan, entirely wrong for the dirt roads of Provence.
The goat is in the drive.
I don't know how. I put him in the top field this morning specifically so that he would not be in the drive. But he is in the drive, and he has planted himself directly in front of that sleek black car, and he is staring at it.
Colette waits. The goat waits.
I have never been prouder of anything in my life.
Eventually Jacques's grandson runs down and hauls him off by the collar, and the door opens, and a woman gets out who looks so much like Iris it takes the breath out of me.
The same dark hair, though hers is silver-streaked and cut in a bob you could open letters with. The same brown eyes, colder. The same fine bones, worn with the particular tightness of a woman who has spent her whole life controlling everything within reach.
She looks at the farmhouse like it has personally offended her.
"She's here," I say.
Iris comes to stand beside me. Her face has gone the colour of paper. "I know."
"Ready?"
"No." She takes a breath. "Let's go anyway."
The meeting happens on the terrace, because Iris refused to let her mother into the house.
"This is our home," she'd said. "She doesn't get to come inside and judge it. She can talk to me outside."
So we sit in the warm afternoon sun, surrounded by lavender, while Colette perches on the edge of her chair like she's afraid of catching something. She declined the coffee I offered. She declined the water. She has declined, essentially, to acknowledge that I exist.
"Thank you for agreeing to see me," Colette says. Her voice is exactly as cold as I expected — polished, controlled, giving away nothing. "I know our last conversation didn't end well."
"It didn't end at all. I hung up on you." Iris's voice is steady, though I can see her hands shaking in her lap. "Because you called my grandmother's relationship a sin."
"I stand by what I said."
"I know you do. That's the problem."
The silence between them stretches like a wire about to go. I sit very still and try not to be a target.
"I didn't come here to argue about the past," Colette says at last. "I came because I'm worried about you."
"Worried about me?"
"You've been here — what, three months? You've abandoned your career, your apartment, your entire life in Chicago. For what? A farm in the middle of nowhere? A house full of bad memories?"
"These aren't bad memories. These are the memories I should have had all along, before you stole them from me."
Colette's jaw tightens. "I was protecting you."
"From what? From knowing my grandmother? From being loved? From understanding where I came from?" Iris leans forward. "You didn't protect me, Mother. You isolated me. You cut me off from my own family because you couldn't accept who they were."
"I couldn't accept the perversion. There's a difference."
The word lands like a slap. I see Iris flinch — see the old wound tear open fresh.
"There's no perversion here," I say, speaking for the first time. "There was just love. Two women who loved each other for thirty-five years. There's nothing perverse about that."
Colette turns to look at me, and her gaze is ice. "I wasn't speaking to you."
"But you were speaking about my grandmother. And I won't sit here and let you slander her."
"Your grandmother." The words drip. "You're not even related to her. You're just some random child whose mother latched on like a parasite."
"Mother." Iris's voice is sharp. "Don't."
"It's true, isn't it? She's not family. She has no claim to this place, no right to any of it. And yet here she is, living in my mother's house, sleeping in my mother's bed—"
"Sleeping with me," Iris says quietly. "That's what you're really upset about, isn't it?"
The silence that follows is absolute.
Colette's face goes through a series of expressions — shock, disgust, something that might be pain. Then it smooths back into the mask. But I've seen under it now. I've seen what's actually there.
"You're not," she says.
"I am."
"But you were engaged. You dated men. You were normal."
"I was performing." Iris stands, her whole body vibrating. "I was trying to be who you wanted me to be. I'm done with that. I'm with Cat. I love her. And nothing you say is going to change it."
Colette stands too, white to the lips. "You're confused. It's this place — it's corrupted you, the way it corrupted your grandmother. If you'd just come home, get away from here, from her—"
"I am home. This is my home. Cat is my home." Iris steps closer to me, and I stand, and take her hand.
"This is who I am, Mother. This is who I've always been. You just wouldn't let me see it."
For a long moment, nobody moves. The lavender shifts in the breeze. Somewhere out in the field, a bird calls.
Then Colette speaks, and her voice is terrible.
"I want you to come back to Chicago. Alone. Without her." She looks at our joined hands with naked disgust. "I'll pay for the flight. I'll help you get your job back. We can forget any of this ever happened."
"I'm not going anywhere."
"Iris—"
"No." Iris drops my hand and steps toward her mother.
"You need to understand something. I am not the girl you raised.
I'm someone new — someone who knows what she wants and isn't afraid to take it.
And what I want is this place. This life.
This woman." She turns and looks at me, and her eyes are blazing.
"I love her. I'm going to spend the rest of my life with her.
And if you can't accept that, then I don't need you in mine. "
Colette's face crumples. For one single moment I see the human under the armour — a woman who lost her mother, who is losing her daughter, who has spent her entire life running from things she cannot accept.
Then the armour goes back up.
"You're making a mistake," she says. "You'll regret this. When the novelty wears off, when you realise what you've given up—"
"Then it'll be my mistake to make." Iris's voice is calm now. Steady. "That's what being an adult means. Making your own choices and living with them."
"And if the consequences include losing your family?"
"Then I'll build a new one. I already have." Iris takes my hand again. "You should go, Mother. There's nothing more to say."
Colette looks between us — her daughter, standing tall and defiant, and me, the woman she blames for all of it. Something flickers in her eyes. Something almost like grief.
"This isn't over," she says.
"Yes. It is."
She leaves without another word, her heels crunching over the gravel. We watch until the car disappears down the drive.
Then Iris collapses.
She goes down onto the terrace stones, folding, and I go down with her. She cries the way she cried over Marguerite's letter — ragged, ugly, torn out of her — and I hold on and say nothing at all, because I've learned by now that's the only thing that works on her.
Eventually: "I think I'm going to be sick."
"Right." I get an arm under her. "Bucket, or lavender?"
"Lavender," she says, with tremendous dignity, and is then sick into her grandmother's lavender.
"There." I hold her hair back. "Very Provencal."
"Shut up."
"It's the most French thing you've ever done."
She laughs, and then she's crying again, and the two are so tangled together she can't get free of either.
We sit on the terrace while the sun goes down — my back against the wall, Iris against my chest, the lavender going gold and then grey.
"I got what I wanted," she says eventually. Her voice is wrecked. "I said all of it. She heard every word."
"You did."
"So why does it feel like a funeral?"
And there it is. The thing I've known since my own mother died with the truth still in her pocket.
"Because you weren't only telling her off," I say. "You were giving up on her. Those are the same sentence. They aren't the same thing."
Iris doesn't answer. She just turns her face into my shirt.
So I hold her until the light's gone. Then I take her inside and make her eat something, because I am my grandmother's child, and that is what we do.
It's later — with Iris finally asleep against me and the house gone quiet — that I let myself think the thing I've been not-thinking all afternoon.
Her mother offered her a flight home. Her job. Her whole old life handed back to her, on one condition.
Leave the woman behind.
And she said no.
She said no today.
And I lie there in the dark, in a house I love, beside a woman I love, running the arithmetic I have run my entire life. How long. How much. How many times can somebody choose you before they get tired of what it costs them.
I hate that I'm doing it.
I do it anyway.