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ceiling, bringing her back to the present. She put the obituary
aside. Like so much in the past, it didn’t matter. Not any
more.

Chapter 3
    1949
     
    “ Complaining will not keep you
alive.”
    She backs through the gate with the chicken held by
its legs as it flaps and squawks. Pausing inside the garden she
looks up at the window. Cigarette smoke curls out, which means
Weston is working at his typewriter. No tapping sounds so he isn’t
actually typing. She wonders if that is good or bad. He believes,
like the chicken, that complaining will change his fate. He truly
thinks that sour thoughts, and words, about his writing not selling
will magically make it sell, when it made sense to accept
defeat.
    Marie-Emilie sets down the vegetables and the bread
on a spot of shade behind the outhouse. She has been lucky at the
market, the first real piece of good luck they’d had in weeks.
There had been potatoes and leeks, and some asparagus for the first
time. The chicken is scrawny but will provide a week’s worth of
soup. The bread was cheap because it is last week’s, hard and dry
but she has a method to make it right again. Normally the farmers
are hard on her at market, raising their prices out of spite. They
are suspicious of strangers, from the war, she imagines, but why
they take it out on her, a real Frenchwoman, is beyond her. The
villagers’ coldness hurts her. She would move back to her own
village in a moment, but there is no house to live in there.
    The chicken scratches her leg with its beak, causing
her to cry out. Weston comes to the window, frowns, and disappears.
Jaw clenched she grabs the neck of the bird and gives it a violent
twist. With the axe she dispatches its head. Basket between her
legs she plucks its feathers, then cleans it. Inside she lays a
fire, filling the kettle with water and hooking it onto the iron
arm. Weston hollers down from upstairs.
    “ What the blazes are you doing now?
It’s so hot my fingernails are sweating and you build a fucking
fire.”
    He appears on the stairs, cigarette hanging from his
mouth, in his undershirt. She dislikes seeing him this way,
half-dressed in suspenders and wrinkled trousers. Sometimes he goes
out on the streets, walking in the evening, like this. Is it any
wonder no one likes them?
    “ Fresh chicken,” she says. “For
soup.”
    “ It’s too fucking hot for soup,” he
growls. “Where’d you get the money?”
    “ Barter,” she says, smiling. “No
money.”
    “ What did you barter then, cherie ?” His eyes are hateful and black. Money is his
biggest worry since things went bad in Nice. They had come with
such hopes, with money in their pockets. All gone now. Between the
wine business and the writing, they haven’t seen any money for a
month. But he finds wine to drink. His fingers are stained with
it.
    “ Old clothes,” she says, smoothing
her cotton skirt. He would never know if she had sold clothes or
not. He hates all her clothes.
    He takes a long drag on his cigarette. “What
clothes?”
    “ Some old ones I do not wear.” In
Nice he bought her the satin dress, fancy shoes, the lovely soft
jacket. She sold them months ago.
    He looks her over with his hard eyes, not lingering,
as she hoped he wouldn’t, on the faded blue scarf she wears on her
head. Planning this day she wore the scarf for a week, hiding her
long, black hair until this morning when she sold it for sixteen
francs to a woman from Bordeaux who makes wigs for whores.
    He frowns at the kettle, now bubbling. “I’m going
out.” In the garden he washes himself in the American way, she
supposes, of splashing a few handfuls of water on one’s neck, and
slams the gate behind him.
    Sitting on the stool in front of the hot fire, she
thinks she will write to her aunt. Ask her why she gave up this
house, if there is some curse on it. Maybe there is a way to find
happiness here that she is too blind to see. With the curse lifted,
Weston will be happy and they will have a