“What’s wrong?” I asked as he came around to my side. “Was it my driving?”
“Not really,” he said gallantly. “The road is far muddier here in the shade. I think we’re a bit stuck.” He kicked the front tire. “My dad is going to kill me.”
I grimaced. Maybe his mild-mannered father wouldn’t kill him, but his parents wouldn’t be happy, that was for sure. This was the only family car, and André needed it to get back and forth for work every day. I checked my watch. The “lessons” had taken up quite some time. We had to head to Beaune within the hour if I was to be on time for my speech. Thank God I was already wearing my good clothes, although when I climbed out of the car and studied the deep well of mud under the front tires, I decided maybe white had not been the wisest sartorial choice.
“What can I do?” I asked.
Franck looked up at me, his eyes wide.
“Why do you look so surprised?” I said.
“It’s just…I thought you would be angry at me for getting stuck.”
“Technically, I got the car stuck, not you.” I watched him a little longer. I didn’t want to bring up his ex-girlfriend but I was too curious to resist. “Would Juliette have been angry?”
Franck hesitated a moment before answering. “Furious. She never would have offered to help either… I like how you’re different…how we’re different—”
“We help each other,” I supplied. “We’re a team.”
“Exactement!” Franck look relieved. “A team.” He examined me a bit further, and then looked at his hands, which were already covered in mud. “I want to kiss you very badly right now but I know I can’t get you dirty.”
“Let’s get the car unstuck first.”
Franck nodded. “Could you try to find a piece of wood—you know, like a big stick or something? I could try to put it under the wheel to get a bit of traction.”
I walked towards the trees, cursing my choice of summer sandals. Finally I found what I was looking for and emerged just in time to see Franck make another attempt at revving the engine. A huge geyser of wet mud flew up from the front wheel and I stepped back just in time to avoid getting splattered. Franck saw me at the last moment.
He leapt out of the car. “Did any of that get on you?”
I looked down—but no—my skirt and sweater were still a pristine white. “Nope. We’re good.”
“Thank God,” Franck came over and took the branches from my hands. “These are perfect. Cross your fingers they work.”
I watched as Franck wedged the wood under the front tires. It was tough, dirty work, and he was both sweating and filthy by the end of it.
He eyed his handiwork. “You’d better back up,” he warned me. “This could get dirty.”
I backed away into the shelter of the trees. Franck revved the car again and again. A couple of times I thought it was working, as the wheels seemed to gain traction on the branches, but at the last second the car slipped back down into the muddy troughs.
Franck got out of the car, slamming the door behind him. He let loose a stream of swear words. I ventured closer, not sure what to say. We had to figure out a way to get to my meeting, even if it meant walking. I wasn’t supposed to be dating in the first place, so how was I supposed to explain being stranded with my twenty-two-year-old French boyfriend? Too late. I started to reconsider the validity of the Ursus “No Driving” rule.
Franck stood at the front of the car, one hand with clenched fingers on the hood, while he looked down at the mud-mired tires. His entire body was rigid with frustration. Without thinking, I moved closer to console him.
Without warning Franck shouted an explosive “merde alors!” and smacked the large splodge of mud on the car’s roof.
I tried to dodge the mud but it was too late—it splattered across my shirt and skirt and began to drip down in clumps to the ground. He couldn’t have aimed better if he tried.
I made an incoherent sound of dismay that made Franck look up and finally see me. His eyes went wide.
“Your clothes…” His voice faded away.
I tried to brush the mud off but only succeeded in smearing it deeper into my now far-from-pristine speech outfit.
“Shit!” I shouted in English. “Shit. Shit. Shit.” I looked at my hands, which were now covered in mud too. Trying to clean myself off with muddy hands was ridiculous. Franck’s horrified expression made laughter bubble up in my throat. I laughed and laughed until I had to bend over to catch my breath. At last, Franck began to laugh too.
I walked towards him, and Franck picked up another, smaller glob of mud from the hood of the car and smeared it down the front of his T-shirt.
“Here, let me help you,” I said, and picked a clod of mud off my shirt and wiped it across Franck’s jaw.
He took his hands and marked a stripe of mud down my face as well.
“Oh my God,” I chuckled. “What a disaster.”
We looked at each other and started laughing again.
After a while, Franck became still. “I love you,” he said.
In that moment I could hear everything. The coo of the birds above us in the trees, the rustle of leaves, the squish of the fresh spring mud…
His eyes searched mine. “Je t’aime,” he said again. “I should have told you before now, but I always think I can’t possibly love you more, and then we get stuck in the mud and then…I do.”
I realized that even though I had no idea how we were ever going to get the car unstuck, let alone get me to Beaune in time, there was nowhere I would rather have been than where I was at that moment. I wasn’t supposed to drive, and I wasn’t supposed to date, and I certainly wasn’t supposed to fall in love, but as I looked into his caramel and green-flecked eyes, I knew that it was too late.
“Je t’aime aussi,” I said. We couldn’t close the distance between us fast enough.
Some time later, a rattling cough interrupted us. I spun around to see a wizened man in moth-eaten woolen overalls and a threadbare sweater standing at the mouth of the woods, leaning on a twisted walking cane. He looked as though he belonged in a fairy tale.
“Bonjour,” Franck said. “Perhaps you could help us.”
The man’s eyes roved over the scene in front of him, missing nothing. “I have my doubts,” he concluded.
Franck ignored this. “I’m not exactly sure where we are. Could you tell me the nearest village?”
The man jerked a thumb over his left shoulder. “Fontaine is over there. Two kilometers.”
“Our car is stuck.” Franck slapped his hand on the roof. “I was teaching my girlfriend how to drive a standard—”
“That wasn’t what you were doing.”
“Well…that’s what we were doing before we got stuck,” Franck clarified.
The man raised one bushy eyebrow.
“I don’t think we’ll be able to get the car out,” Franck said. “I’ve tried everything I can think of.”
The man wandered casually over to the front of the car and studied the front wheels.
“You should never let women drive,” he said, at last. “Dangerous.”
I bristled. “I can drive just fine. I’m just not used to driving a standard.”
The man looked at me again, again cocking a brow skeptically.
Franck placed a placating hand at the small of my back, while I crossed my arms over my chest and made a sound of displeasure. “We’ll just have to walk to the village and see if we can get a drive,” I said to Franck. “Or at least use a phone. We have to hurry though—”
“It’s a small village,” the man said. “Not certain you would find somebody home.”
“We’ve tried everything,” Franck gestured helplessly at the mud-mired tires.
The man tugged at the neck of his sweater. “What about stones?”
“Stones?” Franck said. “I hadn’t thought of that, but wouldn’t they puncture the wheels?”
“Not if they’re flat and positioned correctly,” the man
said, poking at the front tire with his cane.
Franck and I both scanned the woods around us. The only stones I could see were the two enormous boulders placed to mark where the road entered the wood. I was quite certain that several men couldn’t lift them.
“I don’t see any stones,” Franck spoke for both of us.
“Ah!” The man shook his finger at us. “That’s because you young people have no idea where to look.”
The silence stretched out for a weirdly long time, and the elfin French man seemed to be relishing every second of it.
“Alors?” Franck finally prompted.
“Come.” The man plunged into the woods, using his cane to whack away errant branches obstructing his path. “Suivez –moi.”
Franck followed him; and seeing as I was still holding his hand, I did too.
“What if he’s crazy and he’s taking us in the forest to kill us?” I hissed to Franck, as the trees became denser and began to obscure the afternoon light.
Franck paused, looked pointedly at the crooked figure disappearing in front of us, then back at me. “Laura…Please.”
He had a point. “Sorry. No insult intended.”
“None taken.” The twitch of his mouth confirmed this.
We followed the man deeper and deeper into the woods, until the brightness of the spring day disappeared entirely under a tunnel of bushes and trees.
“I always seem to get into strange situations like this with you,” I observed.
“I attract them. Ask any of my friends.”
The man finally stopped and beckoned us over to where he was standing.
“Voici!” he declared. “I bet you never would have found this by yourselves.” He pulled aside a chunk of bushes with his cane to reveal a mossy wall that seemed to continue on the other side of the bush.
“Why is there a wall here in the middle of the forest?” I asked.
The man fixed his scornful eyes on me and shrugged. “Gallo-Roman of course. Been here long before these trees were planted.” He nodded to a cluster of trunks nearby.
Franck inspected the smooth, flat stones wedged between the layers of bright green moss on the wall. “These might work.”
The man nodded. “Take a few each and carry them back to the car. You’ll see. They’ll work.”
I stared at the wall and then back at the man who was waiting, tapping an impatient forefinger on the gnarled top of his cane.
“But if the wall is really Gallo-Roman—”
“Do you think I’m lying?” the man demanded, cutting me off.
“No. I’m just not used to stumbling on Gallo-Roman walls in the woods where I live.
“Where do you live?” The man was clearly incensed at the sacrilegious idea of woods which did not contain Gallo-Roman walls.
I glanced at my watch, which confirmed my suspicion that we didn’t have time to get into the whole Canada conversation if Franck and I had any hope of getting me to Beaune, muddy or not.
I waved my hand towards the sky above the treetops. “Not near here.” The man narrowed his eyes at me, clearly regretting his offer to help a non-Burgundian.
“What are you waiting for?” The man poked Franck’s shoe with his cane. “I don’t have all day.”
“We can’t dismantle a Gallo-Roman wall!” I burst out. To even think of taking apart a wall that had been built in the third century was a travesty.
Our wizened leader snorted. “It’s hardly like this is the only one in these woods. They’re everywhere.” He waved his cane around. “Besides, the Romans probably made this wall out of stones they stole from a Neolithic wall. A thieving people, those Romans.”
Roman thievery notwithstanding, I would not remove a stone from the wall, nor would I allow Franck to do it, Ursus speech be damned. This wall would have been in a museum back in Canada. I would take no part in destroying such a piece of history.
Luckily, Franck solved the impasse by crouching down and finding several flat, smooth stones that had fallen off the wall and landed on the forest floor. “I think these will do the trick,” he said. “Are you OK with taking these, Laura?”
“I guess,” I said. They were already on the ground, after all.
“No difference,” the old man grumbled, but ultimately approved Franck’s selections of stones.
We headed back to the car, each with several stones in our arms. When we reached it, our unlikely helper brusquely instructed us in the correct placement of the stones under the car wheels and gestured at me to stand far away from the car while he signaled to Franck when to rev the engine. I thought this was less from fear that I would get even dirtier and more from the suspicion that the proximity of a woman would throw a pox on the whole delicate operation.
Franck revved the motor and within seconds it came out of its mud trap and flew up onto the rocks.
Franck drove it several meters further until it was well out of the muddy forest.
The man gave a grunt of satisfaction.
“Thank you for showing us the rocks,” I said, eating a large slice of humble pie.
“You young people aren’t very clever,” he noted. “It makes me worry about the future.”
I tried to ignore this bit of rudeness. “Well, I think we learned something today.”
He harrumphed. “Tant mieux.”
He lifted his cane in a perfunctory good-bye and limped into the woods once again.
Franck walked back into the forest to meet me.
“I thanked him,” I said when he’d reached me. “He said that our generation isn’t very clever and that it worries him.”
Franck took my arm and shouted merci and au-revoir to the man’s receding back. The man didn’t even bother to turn around.
“Maybe he’s deaf,” I said.
“More likely he’s run out of patience with us imbeciles.”
“I think you’re probably right… Are we that stupid?”
Franck leaned down and kissed me. “Maybe love makes us stupid,” he said. “If that’s the case I’m at peace with being an idiot. Now come on, we have a meeting to get you to.”
After a hair-raising drive back to the Forestiers, which I thought Franck had enjoyed immensely, I got changed in record time, tried to wipe off the majority of the mud from my face with a facecloth, put on fresh clothes, then hopped back in the car again.
Ten minutes later, Franck was screeching up the circular driveway of the hotel where the Ursus meeting was being held. I checked my watch. Half an hour late. I wouldn’t have exchanged that time in the woods for anything, but my heart sank when I saw Monsieur and Madame Beaupre pacing around the entrance to the hotel, clearly distressed.
They hadn’t met Franck yet, and this was far from ideal circumstances.
I leapt out of the car, apologies already pouring out of my mouth. “I’m so sorry. The car had mechanical problems. We got here as fast as we could.”
Madame Beaupre gave me les bises and breathed a deep sigh of relief. “We were worried, Laura.”
Monsieur Beaupre gave me les bises as well, but his eyes were focused on Franck, who, still covered in mud, was getting out of the driver’s seat.
Franck came around our side of the car and stuck out his hand. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “It was my fault, not Laura’s. I’m Franck Germain. One of Laura’s…friends. Nice to meet you.”
I could feel Monsieur Beaupre go rigid beside me. I wanted to take time to explain, give Franck some time to work his charm like he had on Monsieur Lacanche. Monsieur Beaupre only shook his hand as quickly and perfunctorily as possible.
“Yes. Well.” Monsieur Beaupre put his hands on my shoulders and steered me inside. “We need to get Laura behind her podium.”
With a nod, we left Franck. I managed to send him an apologetic look over my shoulder. He waved me on with a wry smile that told me not to worry.
“Who is that?” Madame Beaupre whispered in my ear. “He’s not a boy, he’s a man. You’re not dating him, are you? You
know that’s against the rules.”
I opened my mouth but couldn’t find the right answer. My relationship with Franck had been unequivocal right from the start, unlike the months of ambiguity with Thibaut. I wasn’t merely dating Franck. I had fallen in love with him.
Monsieur Beaupre hadn’t lost any of his rigidity. “We’ll talk of this later,” he said.
I felt caught between two irreconcilable forces. There had to be a way to make the Beaupres happy and stay with Franck. I just needed to find it.
CHAPTER 35
I was spending every weekend at Franck’s family’s house, and luckily the Forestiers seemed more than pleased with this schedule. Since the meeting, I’d never had time to talk with the Beaupres and try to explain. My speech went well, but Monsieur Forestier was eager to leave and whisked me and his wife out to his BMW before anyone else had even gotten up from their table.
I was well aware that Franck’s family had extended me incredible hospitality. The fact that the Forestiers were never home meant that whenever Franck was in Villers-la-Faye, I was too. For Burgundians, and for the Germains in particular, cooking and baking was a way of showing love. I owed them something.
I had not cooked at all during my time in France. I didn’t exactly feel like it was my place to invade the kitchens of my host families. Also, cooking and recipes were different there—everything was weighed using the metric system instead of the Imperial cups and tablespoons method I had grown up with. Besides, cooking in France was more than a tad intimidating. The food I’d tasted since arriving here was not only exquisite, but also delicious. I wasn’t tempted to throw my hat into that ring.
So when Franck’s family repeatedly begged me to cook something “Canadian” for them, I wasn’t seduced by the idea. What was a truly Canadian dish anyway, besides pancakes and maple syrup, neither of which I could find in France?
Still, they kept asking, and I felt compelled to make something. It occurred to me that I still had two boxes of Jell-O at the bottom of my suitcase.
My mom had bought them for me to bring to France, as she had heard from a friend that the French loved Jell-O. It would be easy and almost foolproof, and it would also introduce them to something they had almost certainly never tried before. Still, the boxes had been at the bottom of my suitcase for almost a year. Would they still be good? Surely powder in a bag didn’t go bad…
My Grape Year: (The Grape Series #1) Page 30
