On Rue Tatin by Susan Herrmann Loomis Read Free Book Online Page B

daunting. Our attitude was “It will all work out.”
    We spent the month of September 1993 visiting our families and our friends on the West Coast as a sort of farewell, then we embarked for France, landing at Charles de Gaulle/Roissy Airport where Edith met us. We piled into her VW van and she flew down the
autoroute
toward Louviers at 150 kilometers an hour, the equivalent of about 100 mph. I looked at Michael who raised his eyebrows. It was great to be back in France!
    Both Michael and I were so excited we could hardly sit still. Joe, a boy who doesn’t like to miss anything, had been awake for days, it seemed, as we took him to and fro to see family and friends. He hadn’t slept much during the twelve-hour plane trip either, but once the van started moving he conked out, draped over his father’s knees. I looked at his pale, chubby, toddler’s face. We knew he was upset at the move because he didn’t quite understand what was happening. We hoped it wouldn’t take him long to adjust.
    Our first stop was Louviers and the house, for Michael’s first look. He extracted the still-sleeping Joe from his knees and laid him tenderly on the backseat. Edith passed the house keys over to him and waited in the car with Joe while Michael and I went to look. The house was as beautiful as I’d remembered. A large red and white
vendu
, sold, sign hung over the door, physical proof that the
compromis de vente
still held good. It gave me a sense of ownership, which helped override the sense of panic I felt as I approached the front door.
    Michael opened it. I held my breath as I walked with him through the rooms. We didn’t talk. We were both too busy looking. I breathed a little easier as I looked at the curved staircase in the foyer—it was still as graceful as I recalled. Michael walked through the door into what I supposed had been the kitchen, a high-ceilinged room with a big window overlooking the back garden, an angled back wall, and a graceful fireplace—it was so filled with dusty antique furniture and piles of newspapers, buckets of stones and wood and other rubbish that it was hard to get a real sense of it. We poked our heads in the other rooms on the ground floor, all of which looked as if small bombs had exploded in them.
    Michael banged on walls, scraped surfaces, looked in nooks and crannies, wiggled doors, opened and closed windows, all things that wouldn’t have occurred to me to do. At the best of times Michael is a man of few words. He was absolutely silent, intent on his inspection.
    I’d truly forgotten what a mess the house was in. I’m not sure I ever really noticed. Even now, as I stumbled over chunks of stone, tiptoed around holes in the floor, and realized that there wasn’t one single room out of the fifteen in the house that could really pass for livable, I felt an excitement bubbling inside. It was a blank slate, ours to re-create.
    The crisp fall weather outside meant the house was cold inside, and as I focused on the holes, the grit, the lath showing through the walls, it seemed worse than I’d remembered. What had I been thinking? What if Michael hated it? What if I’d made a huge mistake? These were questions I was to become extremely familiar with over the next years, as I watched Michael struggle not only with learning the French vocabulary involved in building, but with unfamiliar materials, dimensions, customs, and traditions.
    As we emerged from the last room, the one above the curious little “apartment” that the owner kept, which was even shabbier than it had been the first time I’d seen it, and made our way down the many sets of stairs, Michael’s blue eyes absolutely blazed with excitement.
    “I love it,” he said. I let out my breath. We walked hand in hand into the garden—it was overgrown and messy, but the old apple and pear trees that graced it were unmistakably charming, and the church loomed over all.
    While we stood there looking at the house with its boarded-up