Read Amandine for Free Online Page B

only her mouth showed. Red lips. Pointed shoes. They spoke in Polish, she and Grand-mère. Grand-mère Janka spoke in Polish with the lady, and not a word of French did I hear from behind the kitchen door, the tea tray in my hands. So quiet were they then I’d thought the lady had gone, and so, putting down the tray, I slowly slid the tongue from the lock on the kitchen door, opened it a crack, and there they sat still, the lady in the man’s coat and the pointed shoes and Grand-mère in shawls and pearls. Grand-mère turned to me, smiled. “Solange, please bring the tea.”
    I placed the tray on the big oak dresser, keeping my back to them. “Shall I pour the tea, Grand-mère?”
    “Yes, child.”
    “Will Madame take sugar?” I asked, still not turning around
.
    “No, thank you. No sugar. A drop of milk, please.”
    Her voice small like a girl’s, her French perfect. Trying not to look yet wanting to see her, I handed the tea and, as she took it from me, held it in one hand, she tore off her kerchief with the other. “Thank you, Solange. Let me look at you, dear. I’ve heard such lovely things about you.”
    She held out her free hand, palm up, to me, and when I took it, she closed her fingers about mine, then half let go of them before regretting it, I thought, and holding them longer. “I am happy to meet you.”
    Stunned by her face, such an astonishingly beautiful face, eyes like a deer, black and full of tears, I said nothing, nodded my head. It was I who let go first. I who let her hand fall from mine. I went to pour Grand-mère’s tea, and when I turned to take it to her, I saw that the lady was gone. A small package, roughly wrapped, tied in butcher’s twine, lay upon the arm of the chair where she’d sat
.
    “Where did she go? Who was she?”
    “A friend of the family, child.”
    I picked up the package, ran to the door, flung it wide. “Madame, Madame, your—”
    Halfway to the top of the road, she never turned back. A droning wind shimmied the chestnut leaves, thrashed the door against the stones. She would never turn back, the lady with the eyes like a deer
.
    “Why did she come here, Grand-mère?”
    “She came because she needs help. Our help. Yours and mine.”
    “Mine? Yours and mine?”
    “She has proposed a certain position for you, child. She has asked that you take on the responsibility, the caretaking of an infant. An infant girl, barely a month old, an orphan. She has proposed that—”
    That this baby come to live with us?
    “No. Not that. She would like you to care for the baby in another place. In a convent. She would like you to live, as an extern sister, in a Carmelite convent in the south, near Montpellier. You and the baby would live together among this Carmelite community.”
    “For how long? When? I don’t understand why.”
    “Solange, there will be many things that you will not understand should you take on this work, this next part of your life. I can’t say for how long it would be. I will tell you what I know. Almost all of what I know. You will consider the offer, and you will either accept or decline it. Come here, sit with me.”
    I knelt before her chair, took her hands in mine, kissed her fingers
,
reached up to turn her face to look down at mine. The blue of a dragonfly’s wing, Grand-mère’s eyes, blue melting into green, green hemmed in black, Grand-mère’s eyes. Janka’s eyes. She bent my head to the sun-smelling fiandre of her apron, rested her chin in my hair, touched it again and again with her lips. Her way of talking to me. We stayed like that for a long time. Already saying good-bye
.
    “The woman who was here is—let us say—connected to the Church in another country. She has a particular interest in this orphan child, and she wishes to be assured that it will be cared for devotedly. Why she has chosen to place it in the convent in the south she did not reveal. About why she has chosen you to be the child’s guardian and nurse she said