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Maman smiled faintly at Yvonne; she always looked tired now. "The rain’s let up. I thought we’d weed the lawn around the steps."
"We might die today," Yvonne said, breezily.
Françoise, half asleep, kept her head over her bowl of chicory, forcing the liquid down with tiny, labored sips.
"Did you hear the sirens?" Maman asked.
"I think so."
"I thought so, too," Maman said, putting down her napkin though her chicory was only half drunk. "Brush your teeth, girls, and then we’ll get to work."
And though it was a long time to lunch, and longer still until the hour between one and two when the family rested and Yvonne stood out on her balcony, she didn’t mind weeding today. Françoise hummed mindlessly beside her, and all the flowers were blooming, the roses and the peonies and the foxglove. The heads of lettuce were full and healthy, all in their rows, and the sweet peas covered the fences. She remembered the poem she’d memorized for English, the lark’s on the wing ... all’s right with the world, and, resting on her haunches, looking up at the dove-gray sky, she thought, Yes. It is. She would see him today.
Though the war raged on, though she craved a fistful of butter, still, the damp wind silvered the leaves and the roses grew up the garden wall. And Maman, sweating beneath her hat, wordlessly taking the shears from Françoise, was beautiful, with her fat knees, her rings of sweat. Even Oncle Henri, digging at the far side of the yard, with his cold face, his list of rules and chores, was beautiful. For she was loved.
She gazed at the rust-colored stones in the wall, and at the rabbit hutch with its dark, musty smell so redolent of stew, of the rabbits’ tiny pelts stitched together into coats, their bodies smooth and shiny after they’d been skinned. It had horrified her in the first winter of the war that Maman killed them and that she herself was required to skin them; the first several times she’d wept with Maman standing over her, correcting her technique—you must pull just so, so that the skin comes off in one piece—but now all she thought of was the warm, slippery meat, the soft fur, the glistening bodies, and this was not only because she was in love, but because she was ravenous after her bowl of chicory and a morning outside. And because no matter how warm she grew working in the garden, she hadn’t forgotten the cold of the winter, or the chilblains she could never scratch hard enough.
For lunch they had omelets and salad, though there was no oil for the dressing, no butter for the eggs. But now she didn’t mind: soon they would all take their naps, and she could go out onto her balcony.
"I’d like to talk to you both after you’ve finished the dishes," Maman said to Yvonne and Françoise.
"I’m so tired, Maman," Yvonne said, dry-mouthed, her throat so tight it hurt to speak. She dried the last of the plates. "Could we talk later?"
"Well, of course," said Maman. "Let’s all have a nap."
Her head ached, and her throat, her heart, and the minutes passed more slowly than when, as a small child, she and Françoise had waited in the schoolyard for their mother to pick them up.
The clock struck the quarter hour and Yvonne jumped, her eyes fixed on the end of the street.
The hour came, the quarter past. He was not coming.
Maman knocked on her door. "It’s late, Yvonne." And in her mother’s voice, she heard the truth: they would all be dead soon. Maman had known what she was waiting for, had given her the extra fifteen minutes so that she could die happy. Maman could not have known that he wasn’t coming, that—what? He’d found another girl? Moved away, died? Maman wouldn’t have been watching the street all these weeks and months, she would simply have known that Yvonne would watch it as soon as she came home, and Maman would have allowed her, because they were dying; when you were dying, you could do anything.
Excerpted from News of Our Loved Ones by Abigail DeWitt. Copyright © 2018 by Abigail DeWitt. Excerpted by permission of Harper. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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