Invitation to Provence(29)



“Oh, Grandmother,” she cried, her face alive with a big smile. “Imagine, we are invited to go to France for a family reunion. You never told me we had a family.”

“And I never would have, if it were not for this letter,” Bao Chu said, leaning back against her pillows because she knew this invitation was the only hope for her granddaughter and it meant that she would lose her. “You will go to France, Shao Lan,” she said. “And you will go alone,” she added firmly.

She might as well have been sending her to the moon. Shao Lan’s jaw dropped. “Alone,” she whispered, afraid, because her own little section of Shanghai was the only world she knew. “But why?”

“It’s time for you to meet your father.” Bao Chu began to cough again. And Shao Lan knew her grandmother was too ill even to leave the house, and she cried because she was afraid to go to this strange country alone. She also knew that if she went, she might never see her grandmother again.





PART II





The Preparations





Life is a maze in which we take

the wrong turning before we have

learned to walk.



—CYRIL CONNOLLY





21





CLARE HAD RETURNED from Atlanta, where she’d gone to pick up more of her possessions, and now she had taken up residence in Shutters Hotel, on the beach in Santa Monica. The two had spent all their time together after they’d met, and Franny thought there was nothing she didn’t know about her new friend. In fact, she’d never had a woman friend she felt so close to.

She and Clare were attempting to establish some order from the current chaos in Clare’s room. Looking at the clothes overflowing from the closet onto the bed, the chairs and even the floor, Franny said, “You’re going to need a huge apartment for all this stuff.”

Clare stopped arranging a couple of dozen pairs of shoes around the perimeter of the room and, hands on hips, surveyed the scene. “I should open a shop,” she said with a grin, “except I’m nothing without my clothes—just another woman on the downside of a divorce.”

Franny looked at her.

“Oh, let’s just leave it.” Clare shrugged, dismissing all her worldly possessions with a grin. “Come on, hon, I’ll buy you some lunch.”

In Shutters beachside café, they were surrounded by cool L.A. women with the latest L.A. look. “Check them out,” Clare said, eyeing Franny through squinted lids, mentally making her over. “You too could look like that.”

Franny laughed and sipped iced lemonade through a bendy straw. “I’m not like them and I could never look like them,” she said.

“That’s exactly your trouble.” Clare tackled her chicken Caesar salad with her usual hearty appetite. “You don’t look like the woman you are now. You still look like the girl you were ten years ago.”

“The Oregon girl, that’s me,” Franny agreed comfortably. “Come on, Clare, give it up, why don’t you. You’ll never make an L.A. woman out of this vet.” She pointed a finger at her chest. “This is reality.”

“Honey, you are a grown-up now, you’re a woman. You just don’t know it.”

“You bet I do! I’ve had to be grown-up since I was seventeen. In fact a therapist would probably tell me I’m just longing to stay the little girl I used to be before my father died.”

“Well, you can’t go to a chateau looking like this,” Clare said. “At least the Heidi pigtail has to go.”

Franny clutched a protective hand to her blond braid. “I’ve had this hair for years and I’m not going anywhere without it.”

Leaning over the table, Clare swept the braid up on top of her head. “Now you look like the woman you really are,” she said, but Franny shook her head so her hair tumbled free onto her shoulders.

“Even if you changed me, I’d still be the same underneath. I’d still be the tomboy in the hiking boots and the cutoffs and the T-shirt, I’d still be the vet in the white coat, and the woman in the flip-flops and the dangly earrings from the drugstore.” She sighed. “No dress, no haircut can ever change who I am at heart.”

Clare sighed too, mentally canceling the proposed shopping trip to Fred Segal, where she just knew that with the wave of her magic wand and a fairly large amount of money she could have turned Franny into a new woman.

“Besides,” Franny said, “I don’t want to give the family the wrong impression. This is who I am, this is who they get.” She tethered her braid using an elastic band with a plastic flower on it. “See, I’ll never be a sex kitten,” she said, laughing.

Clare sipped her mango tea. “Hmm, sex kitten. Is that what you were for Marcus?”

“Clare!” Franny was shocked. Marcus was a taboo subject.

“Of course you know he could get quite kinky,” Clare said mischievously. “Marcus liked to try whatever was going.”

“And you went along with that?” Franny was saucer-eyed with curiosity. Her sexual experiences with Marcus had been okay, but never anything out of the ordinary.

“We tried everything,” Clare admitted, “including threesomes.” She laughed at Franny’s shocked expression, lifting an elegant bare shoulder in a little shrug. “Marcus liked it. I tried to think of it as a porn movie. You know, the kind where they always seem to be having a much better time than you ever do when you have sex.” She shrugged again, slurping up the last of the iced tea. “Huh! It turned out to be just ‘movie dust’—all sparkle and no content. For me anyhow.” Franny still looked uncertain. Clare grinned and said, “Fact is, Franny, I like a man in my bed, not a woman.”

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