What Doesn't Choke Will Fatten

I bought escalopes de dinde for the four of us, as per Marguerite's instructions. She likes stuff that's easy to cook and easy to eat for people who haven't much left to chew with.

The butcher's fat brother sat in the little kiosk dividing the mouth of the shop in two. He was wearing his white coat over a big pullover.

"Cold enough for you?" he enquired. "They say it'll get worse, and stay like that for weeks."

"No one's making you sit out here," I said. "Go back where it's heated, maybe do a little work with that brother of yours. What makes you such a traditionalist?"

"Happy New Year to you too," he said.

When I got home, Marguerite was talking about the weather too.

"Cold is forecast. Check all doors and walls—the rodents will come knocking tonight," she said.

"Night of the long tails," I said.

"Enough," said Marguerite.

It was that kind of season. The cat thickened up his fur.

On days like these I test whether I am still capable of pity. There are plenty of opportunities. Last night a man died of cold in Grenoble. Pretending he had a night job, he was sitting in his car all night. Welcome to the new France. I try to compare minus 5 with the minus 30 that winter of '42, but I can only relate it to concrete things like food and toes and the injured hand that made me walking wounded and worth saving. I remember the doctor, an Austrian, but not the pain. The body doesn't want to remember. We all ended up in France. The Austrian was later billeted with a family in the south. He got the girl of the house pregnant and stayed forever.

It was getting near lunchtime when Denis walked in with this specimen I knew was wrong from the start. Denis was smiling and talking too much, his stutter worse than usual. Marguerite closed her face in that Norman way of hers and put another log on the fire. Gives her time to think.

The new one warmed her hands at the fire before she sat. No taller than Denis, which is not tall at all. Dyed hair, busty. I presumed the latter was an advantage as far as Denis was concerned, but the way she went after him he may never even had the time to notice.

All that was fine, allowing for Denis's past history of getting hurt and Marguerite's history of looking out for him. She never adopted or stood for him in any office or church, but he still called her "Marraine," to the point that everyone who knew and loved her called her Godmother too. His own mother died an alcoholic slob—I never found out what drove it—in a shambles of a house above the village. He'd fallen out with most of his family. All either sharks or wife beaters, it was hard to see where Denis the meticulous housekeeper came in at all. The new busty one was fine too, if you didn't know about the money Denis had stashed away from shift work in the car components factory over 25 years, and the odd jobs he did the rest of the time to keep himself from getting depressed. Gardening, chopping wood, anything requiring a strong arm. Gardens as meticulous as his house. You'd meet him at high speed anywhere in the region, some machine or other sitting in the bed of the truck.

So why was this busty American interested in our hard-working stuttering Denis? It seems she found him at his usual campsite over in Brittany, where all our aging bachelors go each year to drink greater than usual quantities of whiskey and Coke, for some reason eschewing the local taste for Calvados. Their way of breaking free, maybe. Education or money can help you break free, but even they are not enough sometimes. These guys had neither.

"She smells of smoke," I said to Marguerite, on a turn in the...