Everything After Tuesday

Chapter One Part 2

CHAPTER ONE PART 2

The Girl Who Took Things Apart

The clock was only the beginning. The radio came apart two weeks later, discovered mid-dismantling on the kitchen table with its insides spread out like a small silver garden. Then the old toaster, which Shuri fixed by accident while trying to understand why it kept burning one side of the bread and not the other, and which afterward toasted both sides so evenly that Grand-mère joked they should sell the secret to a bakery in town. Then the vacuum cleaner, a project that took an entire rainy weekend and left the hallway smelling faintly of dust and victory. Then, memorably, the coffee grinder, which took an extra day to reassemble because two of the screws had rolled under the stove and Shuri refused to consider the job finished until both had been recovered, even after Grand-mère offered to simply buy new ones.

"They belong to it," Shuri had said, lying flat on her stomach with a torch, peering into the dark space beneath the stove as though she were searching for buried treasure. "It wouldn't be right."

Winter was different. The guests thinned out once the weather turned, down to the occasional traveler passing through on their way to somewhere else, and for weeks at a time it was only the two of them in the big house, the shutters closed early against the cold, the fireplace in the sitting room lit every evening whether or not anyone was there to see it. Shuri came to love those months in a way she never quite said out loud, because the quiet of an empty guesthouse was a different kind of quiet than the quiet of a house with no one broken to fix. It was a quiet made for other things. Grand-mère would sit by the fire with her mending, and Shuri would sit on the rug with whatever project had survived the autumn, and between them the radio played low, and sometimes Grand-mère hummed along without seeming to notice she was doing it, and Shuri, without seeming to notice either, hummed along too, always slightly off-key.

On the coldest nights, when the wind came down off the hills and rattled the shutters until Grand-mère finally gave in and let her stay up past her bedtime, Shuri would ask questions that had nothing to do with anything broken at all. Why the stars looked different in winter than in summer. Why her breath turned to fog outside but not inside, even though the kitchen wasn't much warmer than the garden most mornings. Whether the lavender was truly dead in the cold months or only sleeping, and if it was only sleeping, how it knew when to wake up again. Grand-mère did not always have the answers, and said so plainly, without embarrassment, which Shuri found more comforting than if she'd pretended to know everything. Not knowing, she was slowly learning, was not the same as not caring. Some of the best people she would ever meet, though she could not have known this yet, sitting cross-legged by that fire at eight years old, would be people who did not know the answer and wanted to find it anyway.

Eventually Grand-mère stopped asking what her granddaughter had taken apart and started asking, every morning over breakfast, what they'd be repairing that day, the question delivered with the same casual rhythm she used to ask about the weather. Shuri always answered the same way, with total honesty, spooning jam onto her bread with the concentration of someone performing surgery.

"I don't know yet."

Sometimes there was nothing broken in the house at all, and on those mornings Shuri would spend breakfast in a state of visible disappointment, glancing around the kitchen as though something might spontaneously malfunction to save her day. Grand-mère learned, after the third such morning, to keep a small basket of odds and ends in the pantry, broken clasps and tangled fishing reels and once, memorably, an old music box that had stopped playing years before Shuri was born, just so there was always something waiting for those restless mornings. She never told Shuri where the basket came from. She simply let her granddaughter find it, again and again, like a small miracle that kept renewing itself.

There were rules, of course. Very important ones, delivered in a tone that left no room for negotiation. Nothing connected to gas. Nothing connected to electricity, not unless Grand-mère was standing right there with her arms folded and her eyes on every wire. And under no circumstances, ever, at any time, the sewing machine.

"Especially not my sewing machine."

"Why?"

"Because I like it."

Shuri considered this for a long moment, weighing it the way she weighed everything, turning the logic over to check for holes, and finally nodded, satisfied. "That seems reasonable." Everything else in the house, as far as she was concerned, remained open for negotiation, and she treated the sewing machine afterward with the wary respect of a diplomat approaching a border she had agreed never to cross, occasionally circling it in the sitting room, hands clasped firmly behind her back, just to look.

On Wednesdays, Grand-mère took her down into the village for the market, a ritual so fixed in the rhythm of the week that Shuri could have walked the route blindfolded. They left before the heat set in, baskets over their arms, and the walk down the hill always smelled different depending on the season: wet stone and crushed thyme in spring, dust and ripe figs in summer, woodsmoke drifting down from someone's chimney once autumn arrived. The stallholders all knew Grand-mère by name, and most of them knew Shuri too, though not always for reasons that pleased their mothers.

"Ah, here she is," the fishmonger would say, wiping his hands on his apron. "Come to tell me my scale is broken again?"

It had been broken, once, back in the spring, and Shuri had noticed it from four stalls away, the tiny hesitation in the needle before it settled, and had marched over uninvited to explain, in the careful, patient tone of someone delivering very important news, that his scale was undercounting by a few grams and he was likely losing money on every sale. He had not believed her until he weighed his own thumb against a stone he knew the exact mass of, and had bought her a warm pastry out of sheer astonishment, and told the story to every customer for a month afterward.

The other children in the village were kind enough, in the loose, easy way children are kind when nothing particular is asked of them, but Shuri had noticed, without quite having the words for it yet, that conversations with them tended to end differently than conversations with adults. When she explained why a puddle dried faster near the wall than in the middle of the square, the other children's eyes would drift, and someone would suggest a game instead, and she would go along with it, because she liked them, and because running through the square shrieking about nothing in particular was its own kind of pleasure. But there was a small, quiet part of her, one she did not examine too closely at eight years old, that noticed the difference and filed it away the way she filed everything. Grown-ups asked her to keep explaining. Children asked her to stop and come play tag instead. She did not resent either. She simply noticed, the way she noticed a wire that looked tired, and did not yet know what to do with the observation.

Grand-mère noticed too, in the way grandmothers notice everything, and on the walk home one Wednesday, baskets heavier with bread and cheese and a paper cone of chestnuts bought more for the walk than for hunger, she asked, without any particular weight in her voice, whether Shuri had had fun with the other children.

"They wanted to play tag," Shuri said. "I like tag."

"But?"

Shuri considered this honestly, the way she considered everything, turning a chestnut over in her fingers before she answered. "I wanted to know why Madame Aubert's shutters stick, and nobody wanted to find out with me."

Grand-mère laughed, not unkindly, and reached over to tug gently at the end of Shuri's braid. "Not everyone wants to find things out, chérie. Some people are simply happy not knowing."

Shuri frowned at this, turning it over the way she turned over everything, clearly finding it a strange and slightly troubling idea. "Why?"

"I don't know," Grand-mère admitted, smiling. "You'll have to ask one of them."

They walked the rest of the way in comfortable silence, chestnut shells scattering behind them on the path, and Shuri did not mention it again, though she thought about it on and off for the rest of the week, the way she thought about anything that didn't have a clean answer yet.

There was only one afternoon that year when Shuri asked about her parents directly, and it came, as these things sometimes do, out of nowhere at all. She had been sitting at the kitchen table with the photograph from the mantel in her hands, having taken it down without quite meaning to on her way past, and Grand-mère found her there when she came in from the garden, turning it slowly the way she turned every small object she wanted to understand.

"What was he like?" Shuri asked, not looking up. "Papa."

Grand-mère set down her basket slowly, giving herself a moment, though her voice when it came was steady and warm, the voice she used for stories rather than the voice she used for sad things. She pulled out the chair across from Shuri and sat, and told her, unhurried, about the summer her son had tried to build a go-kart out of an old wheelbarrow and two bicycle wheels, and how it had worked for exactly four meters before one wheel came off entirely, and how he had laughed so hard about the failure that he'd forgotten to be embarrassed by it, and had simply started again the next morning. She told her about the way he used to hum while he fixed things, always slightly off-key, and how Shuri did the exact same thing without seeming to notice.

"I do that?"

"Every time," Grand-mère said. "You get it from him."

Shuri looked back down at the photograph for a long moment, at the young man laughing at something outside the frame, and something in her small face settled, not into sadness exactly, but into a kind of quiet satisfaction, the particular satisfaction of a puzzle piece finding its place. She did not cry, and Grand-mère did not expect her to, because the loss had never come to her granddaughter in the shape of an absence so much as in the shape of a story, one that got a little longer and a little warmer every time someone told it. Shuri set the photograph carefully back in its exact spot on the mantel, adjusting it a fraction of an inch until it sat the way it always had, and went outside to see whether the go-kart idea might still work, given the right wheels.