French Kiss by Faith Wolf Page A

met.
     
                On the hottest day of the year so far, he offered her a drink of lemonade. Until then, she'd had to bring a bottle from home, because he forbade her to walk five minutes down the drive to get one. Though he offered her a drink, he made her drink it outside, because her boots were dirty.
     
                “I could slip them off,” she suggested. “They don't even fit properly, remember?”
     
                “No time,” he said and went through to the back of the house where she was not permitted to follow.
     
                For the first few days she had been determined to see inside and had looked in the windows whenever he was out. Once she had even stepped over Patrick, despite his hysterical protests, to examine Gilou's nondescript, utilitarian front room. Like hers, it was a living space and dining area in one. Although she only had a glance, she saw that everything seemed to have a reason for being in its place. She saw cookware and dining utensils, a stove and pans, an old, oak kitchen table and three wooden chairs. There were coat hooks with a variety of jackets. Boots. Firewood. There were no paintings or magazines. No television. No visible radio. There was no sign of anything that might have given him pleasure, as if he existed simply to exist.
     
                She'd felt sorry for him that day, until he returned home in a foul mood and yelled at her to take the dog for a long walk, the longer the better, because he wanted them both out of his sight.
     
                “Who are you talking to?” she asked.
     
                “Now,” he said.
     
                She had no desire to enter his house after that. The animals were more fun to be around than him. Gitane always came over when she arrived, even after days of shooing her away and hissing at her. Eventually, Charlotte succumbed to stroking Gitane's nose, even when nobody was there to see her do it. The same day, Gilou the second had stopped ignoring her, though his mood remained sullen. Another week and a half had passed before she had worked up the nerve to stroke him too.
     
                “You pretend not to like this,” Charlotte observed, “but you're loving it. You are.”
     
                Gilou the second responded by following her across the clearing, leaving his shelter under the oak tree for once.
     
                “Great,” Gilou said from the porch. “Now you can really get in there with the shovel.”
     
                The chickens were all laying, producing over a box and a half of eggs every morning. Gilou never collected the eggs and so Charlotte did so on a daily basis, except for Mondays of course, and she left them on the step in a basket, cleaning them when necessary using wire wool and topping up the hay in the nesting boxes as Gilou showed her. At first, the stench of almost a dozen hens in a sweaty wooden box had been stifling, but by changing the wood chip flooring regularly – twice as often as Gilou had suggested – it became not only bearable chore, but a pleasurable task.
     
                “They you are ladies,” she became accustomed to saying. “Good as new.”
     
                In their way, the animals, even the chickens, responded to her, unlike Gilou, who remained guarded around her. The moment he caught himself smiling, he terminated the conversation in the manner of someone clicking his fingers.
     
                “Don't get used to it,” she thought angrily to herself one afternoon. “I'm not going to be doing this forever.” Like a child, she couldn't help adding: “And then you'll be sorry.”
     
                Indeed, though she spent each Saturday afternoon relaxing on the swinging chair in her garden, she spent every Saturday morning at the Pole Emploi, searching for other jobs for which she might apply. She