Читать книгу The Other Side of Forever - Josette OSB King - Страница 3

“Take la Route des Crêtes toward La Ciotat,” the woman in the flower shop said in the singsong accent of the natives of Provence. “About ten minutes up the road you’ll see a lane branching to the left. It’s le Chemin des Dames. I am not sure there’ll be a sign, but it’s the only road to veer off for quite awhile, so you can’t miss it.”

She deftly wrapped a single yellow long-stem rose without losing eye contact with her customer, her hands repeating motions practiced a thousand times. “I think the house you seek is halfway up the lane; possibly the one with the blue door,” she added, handing him with a flourish the perfect bloom now artistically encased in rustling crystal paper.

She watched him walk across the street toward a top-of-the-line Peugeot dull with the grime of a long drive. “Un bel homme,” she thought approvingly. A handsome man indeed, possibly younger than his gray hair and furrowed face suggested. She wouldn’t mind him showing up at her door with a rose. But then, she always was a pushover for tall men with blue eyes and suntanned faces; and this one was especially attractive with his fluent French embellished by a strong Anglo-Saxon accent. No doubt he was looking for the Figuieris’ house, where the four women had been staying for the past couple of weeks.

They were hardly seen around town, other than when they came to the market every couple of days, but rumor had it they were foreigners. The past two Friday nights, they had gone to Romano’s for dinner. It showed discriminating taste, picking the best restaurant in town from the horde of inviting tourist traps that lined the harbor. Her friend Mireille, who still worked there although the season was almost over, reported they had ordered good wine, quite a bit of it, and had lots of laughs in several languages. At the end of the evening, they had asked her to call a cab. They must have come down for their car early the next morning because it was no longer there by the time Mireille went back to work. Last Friday, they had come in a taxi.

She wondered what they were up to, these forty-something women who seemed to have such a good time with no men around. None of their neighbors knew anything, other than they didn’t cause any trouble and hadn’t had any visitors since they arrived. As soon as the sunburned Scandinavians and the families from Paris went home in September, Cassis became a village again, where nothing went unnoticed.

The Peugeot drove off. Which one of the women would get the rose, she wondered; and what did it mean? There must be a special meaning to it, the way he had carefully selected on this one flower open to perfection. Men who wanted to impress brought large bouquets of roses. Men who merely came for dinner left it up to her to put together a tasteful arrangement. One single yellow rose? It had to be a lovers’ code.

She’d never know. With an unconscious shrug, she turned her attention back to the novel she had reluctantly put down when the blue-eyed man came in.