Page 73 of The Pairing

(One day, the love of my life would say this explained everything about me.You can take the boy out of the fairy-tale hamlet, but you can never take the fairy-tale hamlet out of him.)

When we came to California, nothing was green. It was all dust and sand, all rocks. Brown and pale slate, pebbly and craggy, like the alien planets my dad wrote stories about. The only familiar things were the ones we’d brought from home, the mixing bowls and big wooden spoons, the eggbeaters that had to be turned by hand, the dimpled ceramic trays cradling eggs on the pantry’s highest shelf. When I missed home, my maman would open her book of French pastry recipes, and we would stand together at our new kitchen counter and bake something. Still, I missed the colors.

Then came Theodora.

The first time I ever saw her, she was the brightest thing inthe classroom. The only spot of full saturation I’d seen since we got to the desert. Brassy orange-blond, rose flush and cinnamon-dust freckles, her lip bitten angry red by the bumpy edges of new teeth. She had eyes like the hills of Rhône, blue-green on the outside and honey-gold at the center. I wouldn’t find the right English word for her until spring, when Maman took us out to Antelope Valley to see explosions of wildflowers on the hills. It was the biggest thing I’d ever seen, bigger than the ocean out of an airplane window or the bottom of my own heart. So deep and wide, so much of everything at once. We were eight years old, and Theodora was smiling.

I learned the names of all the growing things I never would have seen back home. Lupine, fiddle-neck, Western blue-eyed grass, California poppy, Theo. Superbloom.

Love took root in me before I even knew its name. Theo was a superbloom. The petals stayed.

THE END

(Kit’s Version)

“Kit,” says Thierry, “did you know that parrots taste with the tops of their beaks?”

My uncle is reclined on his favorite chair, reading a guide to bird behavior loudly enough for me to hear from the kitchen. I don’t mind. It’s been nice, after so long, to hear his Lyonnais accent between the soft thumps of cold butter against sifted flour.

I switch on the oven light and ask, “Is that right?”

“It says here that most of a parrot’s approximately three hundred taste buds are located on the roof of its mouth.” He closes the book and holds it to his chest, turning his face to the sun in the vine-fringed windows. “Such a strange, wonderful creature, don’t you think?”

On my mother’s side, from her father’s father’s father, come two inheritances: a love of all beautiful living things and a pied-à-terre in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The latter is how Thierry can afford to live in a Haussmann apartment in the 6th on a part-time ceramicist’s salary, and the former is why he’s filled every windowsill of it with leafy plants.

Some of my favorite childhood memories happened in this apartment: sprawling on the herringbone floors while Thierry told Maman about whichever woman he’d fallen in love with that month, waking up to the bells of Saint-Sulpice, writing postcards to Theo. I haven’t been back since high school, but when I got the letter from École Desjardins, I booked a ticket.

“Only three hundred taste buds? Seems a bit tragic, compared to our ten thousand.”

“They can still taste many foods, though. They even havefavorites! Constança says her gray one likes mangoes. Benny, I think. Or—no, the gray one is Anni-Frid.” He jots down a note on the side table, determined to remember which of Constança’s birds are named after which member of ABBA.

Constança, Thierry’s latest girlfriend, lives in Portugal and hates long distance, so Thierry is moving out of the pied-à-terre and into a two-bedroom home in Lisbon with a menagerie of birds. I really do admire how devoted he is to believing every woman he meets is his soul mate. This is the third country he’s moved to for love, after Belgium for Lydia and Japan for Suzu. But this is the first time he’s been so sure that he started looking at selling the place.

“Lisbon is glorious this time of year,” Thierry says. “I’ll hardly miss Paris.”

“That’s the first lie you’ve told all day.”

“No,” Thierry says. “I also lied when I told you I didn’t buy any ice cream at the store this morning. I just didn’t want to share.”

“That’s alright,” I say. I lift the cake out of the oven and set it down on a tea towel, then carry it into the living room. It’s a galette de Pérouges, made with my grand-tante’s recipe. “I made dessert for both of us.”

Thierry eyes the cake, then my face. “What is this for?”

“Can’t I just do something nice for my favorite uncle?”

“You have your mother’s eyes,” Thierry says. “And I could always tell when she wanted something.”

“Well,” I say, reaching into my pocket, “I know you’re thinking of selling the place, because there’s no one in Paris to pass it down to. But, what if there was?”

I give him the paper and watch as he unfolds it. Within the first few lines of text, he’s beaming.

“Is this true?” he says. “You are coming to Paris?”

I nod.

“Oh, lovely Kit.” He jumps up to hug me, spinning me aroundlike he did when I was much smaller. “Oh, of course, of course it is yours. And Theo? Tell me Theo will come too.”

I smile. “I haven’t told her yet. But I have a plan.”

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