The Paris Key Read online

  “Yep, I keep meaning to come up with a better French name but never quite got around to it.”

  “Do people here speak English?”

  Dave chuckled. “Not so’s you’d notice. The younger folks more than the older ones. But I went with the English saying because the French word for locks, serrures, was hard for an old country boy like me to pronounce. And besides, after the war Americans were pretty popular around here.”

  Genevieve tried to remember why. She knew the U.S. had been involved in World War II, but she was fuzzy on the details. The Gulf War, Vietnam, Korea, the world wars . . . the dates and details bobbed aimlessly in her head, sticking around only long enough to carry her through whatever test she was taking. Ancient history.

  “We helped liberate France from the Nazis,” Dave explained. “Now, can you carry this heavy bag all by yourself?”

  She nodded, grabbing her suitcase and hoisting it as best she could. The little wheels on the bag wouldn’t roll on the uneven stones. Dave limped as he led the way into the alcove. Maybe everyone had scars by the time they grew old, Genevieve thought.

  He unlocked the little shop and waved her through the door.

  The locksmith shop was petite, more like a large walk-in closet than a proper store. Its dusty shelves were jammed with locks and keys, doorknobs and doorknockers, decorative hinges and shutter hardware. Small wooden barrels held bolts and screws and other metal tools. It smelled of pipe tobacco and some sort of oil, like a car mechanic’s garage.

  One wall was festooned with clocks: cuckoo clocks, painted clocks, clocks with no numbers, clocks in the shape of the sun. Their frenetic ticking filled the otherwise silent space.

  “Let me introduce you to your tante Pasquale—that’s ‘aunt Pasquale’ in French—and to your cousin Catharine, and then I’ll run and park the car. Let me tell you, Genevieve, parking in Paris is not for the faint of heart. But your old uncle Dave has a few tricks up his sleeve.”

  He gave her a wink and opened a small door behind the old-fashioned brass cash register.

  “Bienvenue chez nous,” he said. “Welcome home.”

  Chapter Three

  Mary insisted on taking Genevieve to the airport, located many miles to the south of San Francisco, in the city of Burlingame.

  “Those bags are too heavy to schlep on BART,” Mary said. “Besides, I feel like Paris will swallow you up and I’ll never see you again.”

  “That’s not true. And anyway, it’s only a flight away. You should come visit.”

  “Maybe,” she answered with a shrug. Mary was nervous about driving on the bridge, so she kept her eyes fixed on the span, her hands wrapped so tightly around the wheel, her knuckles were white. Still, when Genevieve offered to drive, she declined, citing the need to practice.

  This had always intrigued Genevieve: Mary was fearless about so much of life, but occasionally some small thing, some everyday function—like signing up for health insurance or driving on the bridge—threw her for a loop.

  Mary was an artist. Like Genevieve, she had been on her own from a very young age. Probably that was why they’d gravitated to each other in the crowded coffeehouse where they’d met; Mary asked to share the table, and after trading a few snarky comments about the oddly bewhiskered hipsters surrounding them, they recognized kindred souls. Unlike Genevieve, however, Mary had a straightforward way of saying what she needed and wanted and thought, without subterfuge.

  The airport was a series of long lines and overly personal security inspections, but Genevieve barely noticed, buoyed as she was by the prospect of imminent freedom. Her seatmate on the plane was a young Greek man, flying to Paris on business. He was dark and handsome, and despite his nice gray suit and sleek leather briefcase, he smelled like the beach: warm sunshine on bare skin, mixed with exotic spices. After perfunctory hellos, she brought out her book and he put in earbuds and closed his eyes.

  The moment the airplane reached altitude, an exquisite blond flight attendant came by, offering flutes of champagne to everyone of legal drinking age. Upon first glance Genevieve had an irrational thought: Could this be the same woman who had escorted her to Paris so many years ago?

  No, of course not; far too much time had passed. This was simply what so many Frenchwomen looked like: slender, elegant, gracious—a flurry of adjectives came to mind, not one of which described Genevieve.

  Genevieve thought of herself as ordinary, clumsy, even evasive. She had inherited her mother’s thick auburn hair and deep brown eyes, but otherwise she felt run-of-the-mill, slightly shorter than average. Thirty-three years old, unhappy, and on the verge of divorce. It dawned on her, only then, that she was almost the same age her mother had been when Angela went to visit her brother in the Village Saint-Paul, a last hurrah before Genevieve was born.

  Was she unconsciously retracing her mother’s footsteps? That sounded like something Jason would propose, now that he was in therapy. Probably his life coach would suggest that Genevieve had never gotten over her mother’s death and that she was running away in search of answers.

  No kidding, she thought. Could anyone who hadn’t lost a parent early truly understand the extent of the loss? Was it even worth trying to explain?

  Angela’s death was the brutal dividing line in Genevieve’s life: First she had a mother, and then she didn’t. The course of the devastation was swift, with only a few weeks from initial detection of the disease to her death. Not even long enough for extended family to be notified and called to her bedside. Her husband and children were still in denial when Angela’s remains were whisked away, leaving them stunned and mortified, awkwardly shuffling through their days, tending to the animals, not talking. Angela hadn’t wanted a memorial service; instead, she requested that her husband and children sprinkle her ashes at the base of the dusty old sycamore tree, the one that shaded the turkey shed. Nick suggested they plant a rosebush in her memory, but Angela had laughed and said no, that if the bush died it would be like her leaving yet again. “The sycamore’s a better bet,” she’d said with a smile. “Nothing will kill that thing. And I’ll be perfect fertilizer.”

  Three weeks after Angela’s death Genevieve experienced the fresh new hell of Mother’s Day. During school Genevieve was allowed to read in the library while her classmates made cards, but she couldn’t avoid the fund-raisers selling carnation posies. See’s Candies, the local florist, even the grocery store . . . she had felt inundated at every turn by the push to celebrate the mother who had abandoned her by dying, who had left her with a yawning void in her life, a need that ran so deep and dark that Genevieve feared she would never reach the bottom, no matter how far she dared dive into the abyss.

  Yet another good reason to move to France, Genevieve thought. No Mother’s Day.

  Or . . . was there? Had they, too, been infected with this Hallmark holiday? Sometimes it snuck up without warning, like in her senior year of high school, when her father took her to Philadelphia for college tours of Penn and Drexel. Jim saw it as an opportunity to teach his daughter a little about history, insisting on shepherding her to see the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. While walking downtown they spied a plaque dedicated to Anne Jarvis, who had begun the tradition of Mother’s Day as a tribute to her own mother, and who then lobbied for it to become a national holiday.

  “Screw Mother’s Day,” Genevieve had muttered under her breath, and Jim, her sad, stoic, somber father, who normally admonished her to watch her language, for once seemed to understand his rebellious daughter.

  He nodded thoughtfully and said, “I’m with you, kid.”

  • • •

  A flight attendant came by and offered more champagne. Champagne in economy class: You had to love the French. But with the second glass, a gnawing uncertainty took root in Genevieve’s belly.

  Ever since hearing about her uncle’s passing and Catharine’s suggestion that Genevieve take over h
is shop, Genevieve had been absolutely sure of what she wanted. Her mind had remained focused on escape, the safe passage away from her current life that Paris seemed to offer. But . . . who was she to think she could make a new life anywhere, much less in Paris? She had already begun the paperwork to request permission to work as a foreign national, but the officials at the Consulat de France had warned her it would be a grueling, time-consuming process.

  And even if she succeeded in that, she would have to figure out how to become certified as a locksmith to maintain the business. Genevieve still practiced opening old thrift-store locks while watching TV many evenings, but locksmithing involved more than just picking locks. She didn’t even speak French, just a few scattered phrases remembered from childhood, a couple of long-ago courses at college, plus the little bit she convinced herself she could learn online. She had planned to continue to study on the plane, but of course a few hours of intensive language acquisition would not be enough to do the trick. How was she supposed to operate a business in a foreign land, in a foreign language?

  And the only souls she knew in France were her tante Pasquale, who was, according to her cousin Catharine’s infrequent e-mails, now beset by dementia; and of course Catharine herself, who had always been a tad strange.

  “I don’t really like the French,” Mary had said with characteristic forthrightness when Genevieve told her she was moving to Paris.

  “How many French people do you know?”

  “None,” she said with a shrug. “But still.”

  Mary was one of the things Genevieve would miss about the U.S. Most of her other friends were conditional: old school friends or work friends or couples friends. Even though Jason was the one who had had the affair, he was keeping the majority of their mutual acquaintances in the separation. With her blessing.

  She pulled out her notebook—a pretty one she’d bought for the trip, wrapped in faux red leather and embossed with what looked like ancient scribblings—and began a list. Blue ink on heavy white sketch paper. I will miss:

  1. Mary

  2. Convenience stores open twenty-four hours

  3. Mexican food

  4. Redwood trees

  Her pen hovered above the paper. What else?

  Her father had passed away last year. Her brother, Nick? Not really. Not if she was being honest. He was still working the family farm in Petaluma, which was newly chic because trendy, upscale restaurants adored his organic specialties, not only vegetables but things like homemade free-range pork sausage. Nick’s wife was an earnest, well-put-together woman who spoke to the farm animals in baby talk and commuted to a nondescript job in San Francisco’s financial district that paid a good salary, with benefits. They traded occasional phone calls, and there were dinners at Christmas and birthdays, but otherwise they rarely spoke or visited.

  Surely there were other things Genevieve would miss. People didn’t just leave their native land without regret. It wasn’t as though she was fleeing war or famine.

  After a long moment, she added one more item to her list: The Golden Gate Bridge. Then she put away the notebook and opened the computer to continue her French lessons. As the hours ticked by, dinner was served—good food served with free wine, this being a French airline—and Genevieve started two different novels but found herself dissatisfied with each; worked on the New York Times crossword puzzle until she was stumped by the name of the German mathematician who invented set theory; then turned back to her French-language page.

  The foreign words—most of which contained far too many vowels—started to blur and bob. She closed her computer to save the battery, shut her eyes, and fell asleep envisioning the Paris that she had visited so many years before.

  The pilot’s voice came over the loudspeaker: They had begun their descent into Paris.

  Chapter Four

  Angela, 1983

  She is a terrible person.

  It doesn’t matter how many times Dave tries to assure her that, no, this isn’t so; Angela knows the truth.

  Perhaps this is why, no matter how she tries, she can’t draw a single deep breath. She awakens gasping, night after night, feeling as though she is suffocating.

  So she has left her husband, and worse, so very much worse, her son. She left her little boy, Nicholas. Tricky Nicky, they call him, but it is a misleading nickname (Nick name!) because the truth is, he isn’t tricky at all. He is honest and straightforward and kind: a good boy with an even temper. Like his father, he is quiet and hardworking and eager to please.

  Angela has left behind his sticky hands and clinging arms and the warm, solid weight of him when he sits on her lap, which he does every rare moment he catches her sitting down. She has left behind the terrible burden of the trust in the big brown pools of his eyes, the pure love that shines from his open countenance.

  Nicholas is just entering the second grade but already he is helping his father on the farm. Already he is preaching to other children about the benefits of organic vegetables, the importance of appreciating the simple happiness of a pig in the wallow when the sun is setting, the dusty elegance of the sycamore trees, the magic of the “fairy circles” that the baby redwoods create when their mother dies.

  Already he understands the importance of the farm not just as a living, but as a vocation.

  The farm. Somehow in all the time when Angela was fighting her way out of rural Mississippi, landing a scholarship to college, where she rallied and marched for civil rights and social justice—everything from voting rights to banning the bomb to ending apartheid—she had never imagined herself ending up on a farm. She had grown up on something very closely approximating that, but when Jim talked about going back to the land in such romantic, sweeping terms, she hadn’t fully realized what his talk about food-as-politics signified. It meant mornings spent feeding livestock that stank of musk and damp. Days in the punishing sun tending to aphid-infested broccoli and pulling Japanese beetles off the spinach. Evenings spent haggling over endless paperwork, trying to get their farm officially certified as organic. Their future and their son’s future dependent on whether it rained too much or not enough, whether the blight or the insects or the drought would deal them a deathblow. It meant never, ever taking a vacation because the farm must be tended to at all times.

  It is a good life. She is very lucky. Everyone tells her so.

  Still, the farm is as relentless and unforgiving as a child. Its demands are more or less outrageous at different points in the season, but they are always there. Forever in the back of your mind, even when you manage a day trip to San Francisco with girlfriends or a rare evening out with your husband.

  If only she could breathe.

  It had gotten so bad Angela tried confiding in her mother, of all people. But she laughed at Angela, her words coming over the telephone line, cutting and bitter, saying it’s not so easy to run away from real life, is it, missy? Reminding her that she had tried to escape her rural background, even honeymooning in la-di-da Paris, but oh, how the mighty do fall. And telling her to do her duty, take care of her husband and child, and stop whining.

  Complaining is the number one sin. Angela knows that. Accept your situation, count your blessings, get back to work. Stop whining.

  And Angela will go back. Of course she will. She just needs a little break, just a brief respite. To remember how to breathe. She will go back to Jim and Nicholas and things will be just as they were. Among other things, she has to attend to the canning; she imagines the peaches are almost ready, and when they come, they come with a vengeance, the tree’s drooping arms finally letting go its heavy fruit like the rush of falling marbles in one of Nicky’s favorite games.

  She will go back and she and Nicholas will watch silly reruns of I Love Lucy together over organic cornmeal-crust vegetarian pizza, and Jim will fret about the state of the broccoli, and everything will be just as it was, as it always has been.
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  What she wouldn’t give for one deep breath, the air streaming fully into her lungs, that exquisitely sweet feeling of expansion. Of life. Even the radio seems to mock her. In one of the year’s most popular songs, the Police keep singing: “Every breath you take . . .”

  “Look at everything we’ve built here,” Jim had said. “The crop’s looking good this year. And the turkeys are on track for Thanksgiving sales. We’re surrounded by beauty, living the dream. What more could you want?”

  She had no answer for him. Most of her old friends from school had landed regular jobs with stock options and dental plans and benefit packages and lived in tract homes in the suburbs. Imagining swapping her life with theirs makes her feel just as tired, just as breathless.

  Perhaps she is experiencing nothing more exotic than an early-onset midlife crisis, like she’d read about just the other day while in line at the grocery store, right after Nicholas—good, obedient Tricky Nicky—refused the candy she offered him, since she wanted to indulge in a Snickers bar herself. She knew she was a bad mother for trying to tempt him. In theory, she and Jim didn’t believe in processed sugar, though truth to tell, Angela couldn’t give a damn from time to time. Let the poor kid have some fun before he had to start thinking about things like fat-free diets and processed sugar and preservatives.

  “Here, have a pain au chocolat. The best in the city. Then you can tell old Dave what’s going on in that pretty little head of yours.”

  His tone is light, but Angela knows Dave’s heart is breaking for her. She knows he is appalled that she has left her husband and son behind, but he can’t know what it’s like, that life. The oppressiveness of it; all encompassing, heavy, energy sapping, like the full, wet heat of an August afternoon in Mississippi. When they were kids they had no air-conditioning; at night their mother would place wet sheets on top of them so they could sleep in the still, hot air. Angela remembers that feeling: every inch of her skin damp and feverish, yearning for a breeze, for relief.