The only thing we avoid talking about is Monroe. As far as I know,Mamanis still convinced she’s a con artist out to charm her way to my fortune, and I’m still too strung out over the lack of texts or calls on my phone to want to start hashing that out again.
When it seems we’ve finally run out of things to say, I nod at the bookMamanset down on the bedside table.
“What were you reading to her?”
She tilts the cover ofMadame Bovaryup so I can see it. “Flaubert.”
I stare at the green canvas of the cover, its letters scrawled in swooping silver loops. It’s one of the books my father always seemed to have on hand, another of the ‘great works of French literature’ he used to quote so much.
“Maman,” I find myself asking before I can think better of it, “do you even like Flaubert?”
She squints at me. “Your father liked Flaubert very much, Julien. He said—”
“But do you?” I interrupt. “Doyoulike Flaubert?”
She searches my face, considering me carefully before she replies. “It’s an important book. It’s one everyone should read.”
“But do you like it?”
She taps her nails against the cover, and I notice her usual French manicure is missing.
“Are you trying to tell me something,mon fils?”
“I just...” I trail off, letting my eyes wander to the bed and then quickly back to her. Maybe it isn’t the time or place for this conversation. “I’ve just been thinking.”
She reaches for my hand. Hers looks so tiny clasped in mine.
“I’ve been thinking too.”
She pauses long enough that I think she’s going to leave it at that, but then she lets out one of those so-very-French sighs and continues.
“I always told you I didn’t understand why you wouldn’t take the trust fund money, but I think maybe I did. I think it might be the same reason I read all those books your father loved.” My shock must register on my face because she pats my hand while her lips twist up in a little smile. “This isn’t the first time I’ve thought about it. Tell me something, Julien. I’ve always wondered—did you leave Cambridge because it was what you wanted, or because...because it’s what you felt you had to do?”
“I mean, it—it wasn’t so much what I wanted to do as what Ineededto do,” I admit. “I felt stuck at Cambridge. I wasn’t going anywhere fast enough.Papanever even went to school, and—”
“But he always wanted you to.”
“Hesaidthat,” I counter, “but I always felt like he was disappointed in me for going to England. He understood why I wanted to leave the wineries, why I wanted something that wasmine, but I don’t think a degree from Cambridge University would have been enough for him.”
“Would it have been enough for you?”
I look into her eyes and answer honestly, more honestly than I’ve been able to answer to myself for years.
“I don’t know. These past few months, I...I just don’t know.”
My mother looks toward her own mother. “It makes the past feel more immediate, doesn’t it? When someone is...”
Dying.
“I think all the big moments do that,” I say softly. “All the comings and goings, the ends and the beginnings...”
I picture Monroe, her head tipped back to stare up into my eyes, that wide smile and the determined set of her brow. That’s what she is to me: a beginning.
“That girl,”Mamanbegins, nearly making me jump at the way she seems to have read my mind, “tell me about her.”
“You mean the gold digger?”
She gives me a grimace that tells me to knock it off.
