Silent Bird Read Online Free PDF Page B

to the window and leaned out as far as possible, relishing every fresh clean lick, every reflection and hue of shiny cobblestones and gray skies and pattering drops colliding with all those Radio Fun umbrellas.
    Down below , the café’s owner busily dragged chairs to tables. Her hair looked black and stringy, her profile exquisite and Arabian. I called a greeting—that “ ç a va ” bit came in handy—and she flashed a gap-toothed smile. This was all the encouragement I needed to throw on some clothes, grab my sketchpad, and venture downstairs to the driest table in the corner.
    The lady in charge sidled up to greet me. “I am Madame Nony. You live upstairs, yes?” she said in a guttural accent as heavy as the clouds scudding overhead.
    I introduced myself and ordered a café “ avec au lait .”
    “ With milk?” she echoed, smile fading.
    I was n’t sure what I’d said wrong. She brought what I requested except with the milk steamed and inside the cup already. I was sipping it when a different woman approached to hand me a menu. She was younger, with long curly wheat-colored hair and gray eyes, and she didn’t look like a waitress; more like a model from a small town, humble and wholesome and quite accidentally gorgeous.
    “ Hello, Mademoiselle. I am your serve person,” she said in musical-sounding English. “I can help you? You have hunger, perhaps?”
    I did indeed have hunger. I asked for any kind of sandwich, and she brought it nesting inside a basket: ham and cheese slapped inside a baguette. “Mm,” I said, thinking: Where is the tomato? The lettuce? The mayonnaise? The pickle?
    “ Enjoy your meal.” She leaned companionably against an adjacent table to watch the rain. “You are American, yes?”
    I told her I was from Long Island. She said her name was Monique and she normally worked in the American Library, on the other side of the Esplanade Charles-De-Gaulle near the medieval medical school. Today she was helping her friend Madame Nony in the café. I explained that I was an artist and enjoying a prolonged stay in Provence. She explained that she was a mother and wife and librarian and that she felt more than happy to live in the loveliest city in the world.
    After that we stopped talking. I ate and sketched and she stood nibbling on a sandwich. It seemed so peaceful eating together—and natural, as if our meeting had been fated, if you believe in that sort of thing. I mean: do we recognize when we’ve met for the first time one of the best friends we will make in this life? Do we sense when an unimaginable—and in this case, unwanted—change is about to occur?
    As I drank more faux-pas coffee, Jeannot emerged from his building. He glanced at the sky, tucked his still-closed umbrella under one arm and the ever-present magazine into a pocket, and strode into the drizzle. He didn’t notice me. Maybe he didn’t expect to find me anywhere other than inside my studio, in some state of undress.
    “Jeannot!” I waved.
    He quickly changed directions. “Ah, Pilar,” he said warmly, and kissed my cheeks: one, two, three times…then one more kiss on the lips. “It is fantastic to see you outside! You feel better, yes?”
    “ Yes, thank you.”
    He ordered a coffee as noir as mine was not. Then he gestured at my sketchbook. “May I see what you are doing?”
    At that point in my life, I rarely shared my work. An odd tendency, I know, for someone who always longed to create children’s books. But if I was gun-shy about how people might react, it had little to do with criticism. When I was small my drawings seemed to upset my mother. Like the time I drew the three of us—me, Mom and Dad—standing on an empty beach: no houses, no beach umbrellas, just dunes and seashells. You didn’t give us faces, she said, alarm in her voice. And: Your Daddy is upside down.
    I probably would n’t even be in France if she had accepted those empty faces and upside-down Daddy. Instead she turned away, and I