Paris by the Book(67)

Chef Picard is our own nickname; the food all comes courtesy of a frozen food chain, Picard, whose stores I avoided until Molly finally revealed the source of her gourmet cooking. My first impression, when I finally entered one, was how antiseptic it looked. The space was filled with glass cases, flooded with bright white light, and the walls, while cheerily painted, were almost completely blank. But the packages themselves are adorned with museum-quality photographs that, unlike in America, accurately reflect what’s inside. I sometimes like making Picard meals just to look at them. And when I do, I often think of Robert’s creations. Of the “cooking shows” with Eleanor.

Frozen or fresh, the meal completely charmed Eleanor—I had opted for beef carpaccio with olive oil and basil for her, Ellie, Daphne, and myself, and then pépites de poulet panées—chicken nuggets—for Peter and Annabelle. (Molly says the secret is to use the Picard as a base and then add your own tweaks, but I like what Picard makes just fine.) Eleanor quizzed the girls on school (very hard, they said, and it made them feel like school stateside had been too easy), life in Paris (they wished the church bells didn’t ring so early and often), and, finally, the bookstore.

“When I was a little girl,” Eleanor said, “I dreamt of living in a bookstore.”

“You did?” said Peter. I could see he found Eleanor more grandmotherly than his actual grandmother, Madame Brouillard. “What kind of bookstore?”

“Oh,” said Eleanor, putting down her fork and knife and taking up a napkin. “I think it was a red bookstore in a faraway place.”

“Our father is often far away,” said Peter.

“This bookstore is red!” said Annabelle.

“And I dreamt that there was a little apartment above the red store,” Eleanor said quickly.

“There is an apartment above this store!” said Peter.

“And that I could go and see the books anytime I wanted,” said Eleanor.

“We can’t do that,” said Annabelle. “Our papa says we would get distracted.”

“I can’t imagine there are better things to be distracted by than books,” said Eleanor.

“Mais oui,” said Daphne.

“I think you dreamed of this store ici!” said Peter. The same way question marks defined Robert, exclamation points defined Peter. Even the shapes fit each of them—besieged, Robert curved over into a hunch? Exuberant, Peter often popped straight up out of his shoes!

“Ici means ‘here,’” said Daphne.

“Yes, I think I did dream of this very store, here,” said Eleanor.

“Sometimes,” Ellie said, “it’s a nightmare.”

Peter made a face. Annabelle liked to torture him by always asking to have Mon Premier Cauchemar—a French picture book about nightmares—read to them at bedtime. Ellie poked Annabelle. Daphne stifled a laugh. I looked at all their faces—this was a family, a kind of one, the five of us. Even without a father, even with two kids on loan from another father, we were our own kind of intact, “normal” family, the kind who kidded with each other over dinner and ate beautiful food.

And I thought, once again: Robert would have loved this. Not a guess. It was there in the pages of his manuscript. The family loves Paris. It loves almost all of them back.

“Let us not talk of nightmares so close to bedtime,” Eleanor said.

“I only meant that it’s not easy running a store,” Ellie said. “Sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes people steal things.”

“Like the gypsies!” Peter said.

“Peter!” Ellie said. Just a month prior, Ellie (and Asif) had been at a rally in support of the stateless Romani at the H?tel de Ville, arguing that the Romani were habitually accused of crimes that they did not commit. Ellie decreed that we were not allowed to say the word gypsies, nor even to read Bemelmans’s Madeline and the Gypsies. This was hardest on Peter, since the book featured a circus. (He thought all books should, and not enough did.)

“One time someone stole one of my books,” Annabelle said.

“Oh, dear,” said Eleanor.

“Well, if you just leave your own books lying around,” Ellie said, “what do you expect?”

“People to be honest,” Daphne said.

“Don’t we all,” Eleanor said, and turned to me. “And when is bedtime, by the way?”

“There were some kids just today,” Daphne said. “While Ellie was down meeting you at the hotel. A bunch came into the store, and I know one of them stole something.”

“Ellie,” I said. “This is why I don’t like Daphne being left in charge of the store all by herself.”

“I like being in charge,” said Daphne.

“I was only two doors down,” said Ellie. “So were you.”

We had a simple protocol with shoplifters: let them steal. Sometimes, if the suspect was younger than herself, Ellie broke the rule and would confront him or her (more often the latter, which surprised me) outside the store. I would often undo Ellie’s police work by making a gift of the book. One time Ellie had intercepted a young, freckled, overweight girl in the act of stealing Dieu, tu es là ? C’est moi Margaret ! With apologies to Judy Blume, that’s a book I almost think a young girl should steal (which is why I stock it even though Judy Blume is still alive—and may she live forever). And adults stole Bibles and cheap Shakespeare editions, while the backpackers, maps.