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good at it, and when Sophie would help her, Robert always complained because he had to make his own bed.
    The two distant relatives looked at each other for a long moment, as Carole narrowed her eyes appraisingly. “You look a lot like your father as a child. I haven’t seen him in twenty years,” she added, but without much regret, as the words mean-spirited leaped to Marie-Ange’s mind, and she began to understand. Her great-aunt seemed cold and hard and unhappy, perhaps because she was in a wheelchair, the child decided. But she was polite enough not to ask her about it. She knew her mother wouldn’t have wanted her to do that. “I haven’t seen him since he went to France. It always seemed like a crazy thing to me, when he had plenty to do here. It was hard on his father when he left, working the farm, but he didn’t seem to care much. I guess he went over there chasing after your mother.” She said it as an accusation, and Marie-Ange had the feeling she was supposed to apologize to her, but didn’t. She could see now why he had gone to Paris. The house she was in looked depressing and sad, and his aunt at least was anything but friendly. She wondered if the rest of the family had been like her. Carole Collins was so totally different from her mother, who was warm, and gracious, and lively, and filled with fun, and so very, very pretty. It was no wonder her father had gone to find her, particularly if the other women in Iowa were like this one. Had Marie-Ange been older, she would have realized that what Carole Collins was, more than anything, was bitter. Life had been unkind to her, crippling her at an early age, and then taking her husband from her a few years later. There had been very little joy in her life, and she had none to offer. “I’ll wake you when I get up,” she warned, and Marie-Ange wondered when that would be, but didn’t dare to ask her. “You can help me make breakfast.”
    “Thank you,” Marie-Ange whispered, tears bulging in her eyes, but the older woman appeared not to see them. She turned and wheeled away then, as Marie-Ange closed the door to her room, sat down on the bed, and began to cry. She got up finally and made the bed, and then dug into her suitcases until she found her nightgowns, perfectly folded by Sophie. They had little embroideries on them that Sophie had done with her gnarled old hands, and they were of the finest cotton, and like everything else she owned, they were from Paris. Somehow Marie-Ange knew that Carole Collins had never seen anything like them, nor would she ever care to.
    Marie-Ange went to bed and lay in the dark for a long time that night, wondering what she had done to have this terrible fate befall her. Robert and her parents were gone, and Sophie along with them, and she was left now with this terrifying old woman in this dismal place, and all she wished as she lay in her bed that night, listening to the unfamiliar sounds outside, was that her parents had taken her with them when they left for Paris with Robert.

Leap of Faith

Chapter 3
    It was still dark the next morning when Marie-Ange’s Aunt Carole came to get her. She sat in her wheelchair in the doorway of the room, told her to get up, and then abruptly turned her wheelchair around and rolled herself into the kitchen. And five minutes later, with tousled hair and sleepy eyes, Marie-Ange joined her. It was five-thirty in the morning.
    “We get up early on the farm, Marie,” she said, dropping off the second half of her name with studied determination, and after a minute Marie-Ange looked at her and spoke up clearly.
    “My name is Marie-Ange,” the child said with a wistful look, in an accent others would have found charming, but Carole Collins didn’t. To her, it was only a reminder of how foolish her nephew had been, and she thought the double name sounded pretentious.
    “Marie will do fine for you here,” she said to the child, setting a bottle of milk, a loaf of bread, and ajar of