Page 30 of I Love You in French

“I never had that experience.”

“Of course you didn’t. And be glad for it.” She scrubs a nonexistent stain on the counter and mutters, “Stupid turkey.”

“Okay . . . well, Lily—wait—what was Sparrow?”

“Oh, right.” She veers back on track. “She was supposed to be Plymouth Rock.” She scoffs, and I smile. “But she told the teacher there wasn’t any way she could possibly be a rock because rocks aren’t human, and she couldn’t pretend she wasn’t.”

I let this little revelation sink in.

“So, you see? Sparrow is who she is. What you see is what you get.”

My heart lifts. If that’s true, I really like what I’m seeing. But I’m not sure if she will like my own story. “So, if she can’t pretend, what is this all about? What does she need?”

My hope is that Lily will spill something, anything, that will give me a clue to the reason Sparrow has built such thick walls around her heart. I think they are cracking, but I’m worried it’s not enough. The pictures on the wall indicate that she’s at least partially French, so maybe it has something to do with her heritage. But that can’t be the only reason she declared to the universe that she would only consider dating a Frenchman. It just can’t be.I think I notice one of my guitar picks peeking out of a canister of coffee when Lily turns toward me.

“Nice try, D’Artagnan. But no. I don’t spill heart secrets.”

“Lily . . .” I almost plead.

“No. If you don’t figure it out, then you don’t deserve her.” She grabs my plate, a half-eaten cookie still on it.

“I was still eating that!”

“You weren’t,” she says while wrapping it up in a tiny box and putting it in front of me. And I wasn’t. The thing’s been untouched for the past thirty minutes.She points to the empty espresso cups in front of me.“And those?”

“Don’t. Even. Say it,” I mutter.

Lily slowly backs away.“Decaffffff,” she whispers.

And I sigh. These women . . . the one I can’t get out of my head and the one who acts like her bouncer . . . they’ll be the end of me. I just know it. An idea swirls through my mind. It’ll be me laying down one of my cards. And trusting Sparrow won’t take the whole hand.

Chapter Twelve

Sparrow

I watch a lot of shows on YouTube in French. I can’t really understand what most of them are saying, but I’m super proud of myself for understanding a lot of mannerisms and picking up more words lately. It’s hard to explain why it’s comforting, even when I’m not entirely sure what they’re saying, but it is.

Some part of me must remember my mother speaking to me in French when I was little. My father only knew how to listen—he never tried speaking French, except for a few words to my mother. He said that he knew he didn’t have the sound, so it wasn’t his role to try to pretend he did. He wanted to leave that to her, but without her, I’m afraid that sound I could have had left me before it even had the chance to flourish.

I pull the dough I’ve been stirring off the stove and prepare my piping bags. I love the feel of piping choux pastry, or pâte à choux, onto baking sheets. My father loved it too. At two or three in the morning, I would smell melted butter and a mixture of flour and eggs. It was the smell that often woke me up from my dreams. And when I would tiptoe down the stairs, my feet in socks so I didn’t alert my father that I was also out of bed, I would see him in the kitchen with a dozen or so pastry sheets surrounding him.

He wore an apron that still had embroidery from my mother on the pocket, and he would be standing there, piping rows and rows of choux, the dough that makes up everything from eclairs to profiteroles, or cream puffs.

His large hands gripped the distressed pastry bag with such precision and grace it was like a farmer tending a garden or a surgeon utilizing their skills but through pastry.

I would sit on the little step leading down to the bakery from the back door and watch him work. He always hummed. Usually, they were songs from my mother, and usually, they were French. Sometimes, I would also catch him humming classics from Simon & Garfunkel or The Beatles. I think baking was his therapy.

My father never wanted to own the bakery on his own. When he started it, the goal was to make my mother’s dreams come true. It was never his dream to own such a place, even though he was a master baker. He never went to culinary school. Everything he knew how to do, aside from bread, he learned from my mother.

But he treated the café and bakery with the same care and intention with which he loved my mother—and taught me a lesson in what it means to do something and keep doing something with all your heart.

I once asked my father what he would’ve done if he hadn’t met my mother. And he said that he would probably still be baking bread somewhere in Boston and eating toast with two pats of butter and nothing more.

He said knowing that pains au chocolat existed because of my mother made all the difference in his life.

When we ate breakfast together, he would often say, “Sometimes some of us settle for what we know, and we think that butter is so great on toast because we’ve never eaten a croissant. Be someone who knows the difference.”

I walk to the front of the store, a folder in hand. As I look about my bakery, I guess what I’m wondering is, even though I’ve never been to France, at what point do I get to feel more French? Maybe this was something my mother was supposed to assure me of, and now, I have to settle for what I am: a French American woman who has learned to hide the fact that hearing French makes her want to cry. That choux pastry was one of my first foods, and being surrounded by chocolate creme and butter is as familiar as breathing. Or that I sometimes dream in French. Because when I wake up, I’m Sparrow, a woman who lives in a tiny New England town, has wild hair, and still dreams of seeing Paris.

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