The Scent Keeper(86)

“Good for her,” Fisher said.

“Not really.” She looked at him. “I know exactly what it takes to succeed, Fisher,” she said. “Everything I own I got for myself. You might want to try that.”

Years ago in school, our history teacher had taught us about knights throwing down gauntlets. I had thought that gauntlets were like gloves—soft. But the original ones were made of metal. Hard as words.

Fisher stood, more in reaction than intention, his chair rasping across the concrete floor. The waiter quickly approached. He’d been hovering nearby—listening, probably.

“Everything all right?” he asked. He turned to Fisher. “Can I get you something, sir? A box?” He motioned toward the food.

Fisher drew himself up, turned to Victoria. “Sure,” he said. “I know someone who appreciates leftovers.” The waiter scooped up the plate.

“I’ll see you later,” Fisher said to me. He leaned down and kissed me, right in front of everybody, and then followed the waiter to the back of the restaurant. I just sat there, stuck in my chair by all those eyes upon me.



* * *



The waiter came back into the dining room. Victoria made a motion, and he brought me a glass of wine without any questions. I downed it like a sailor and felt it rush to my head. Victoria watched, saying nothing.

“Why did you do that?” I asked after a while. She knew I didn’t mean the wine.

She wiped the corner of her mouth with her napkin. “You don’t really know a fragrance until you get to the base notes. And I’ll tell you this—I’ve been challenged plenty of times in my life, and I never gave up the table. Your sweetheart, apparently, does.”

“That’s not who he is.” She, who read her customers so well, was wrong about him. The kiss he’d given me had been a promise, not a challenge. He’d left to keep his pact with me not to fight.

“Are you sure?” Victoria said. “I thought you said you came to the city to find him. You’ve been here for what—almost eight months? Why is that just happening now?”

I wanted to defend Fisher, to tell her that things had been hard for him, but doing so would mean letting her know he’d failed. I stayed quiet, trying to figure out what this whole evening meant going forward.

“Men will always betray you, Emmeline,” Victoria said, shaking her head.

“They aren’t all the same.”

“You think?” she said. “Because that’s certainly been my experience.” She pushed her plate aside. The waiter picked it up.

“What about my father?” I asked, leaning toward her. “You said you loved each other.”

“Exactly. And look what that got me. When things went bad, he ran away and left me to clean up his mess. Men are selfish. They may or may not mean to be, but they are.”

I tried to reconcile what she’d said with what I knew of my father. She was right in some respects, I had to admit. He’d left me, too, even before he drowned—disappeared into those scent-papers that he’d loved more than me. And he’d lied about so much. My name. My birthday. He’d taken me away from any chance at a normal life, brought me up in a way that suited him.

But even as I thought these things, I had a vision of him on that first day of spring, walking up to the cabin with Cleo on a leash, bringing me a new friend—even though I was his only one.

He was a good man, Emmeline, Rene had told me. Don’t let anybody tell you different.

His voice competed with Victoria’s in my head: He ran away and left me.

But then something about my mother’s words struck me: she’d never mentioned me. Once again, I was a footnote, skimmed over in the story of her reinvention.

I stood up.

“Where are you going?” Victoria asked, her voice low.

I could see a white office, full of the scent of petrichor, and a figure surrounded by bottles.

“There’s someone I need to find,” I said.

At the door, I looked back and saw Victoria, taking a bite of her salad, as if the staring eyes around her existed not at all.





THE STORY


The world had grown thick with mist while we were inside the restaurant. The lines of the buildings had lost their precision, the sidewalks turned dark and glossy. The moisture found my face and then my curls, but I ignored the chill and set off. I wanted answers.

Something told me Rene might still be in his office. His rumpled clothing and the stacks of old coffee cups on his worktable had suggested late nights and a social life lived more among fragrances than people. When I pushed open his door, I saw that I’d been right. He looked up, seeming almost confused to find himself somewhere real and solid. The room was suffused with the aroma of hot chocolate—not the watery, instant kind, like they sold in the cafeteria at school, but the real thing, like Colette made, a bar of chocolate grated into shavings and melted into fresh milk. I looked for a hot plate, a pan, but there were only small glass bottles.

Rene took in the dripping mess of my hair with a quizzical tilt of his head. He cast about, then seized a brown paper towel and handed it to me. It was stiff and scratchy and did almost no good, but I smiled at the gesture anyway.

While I did as much as I could with the towel, Rene’s hands continued to play among his scent bottles, moving them about like chess pieces, like friends. I wondered what they were saying to him. I would have given anything right then to be able to hear their stories.