Free Girl in the Afternoon by Serena Burdick Page A

Aimée had not met her at the Salon de Paris as planned, Leonie assumed Aimée was unhappy with the painting and as a result came to sack her as a model, artists being exceedingly fickle and endlessly unsatisfied.
    But Aimée’s thoughts were far from painting.
    â€œWhat’s got your face all twisted?” Leonie said while scrubbing rhythmically. “Might as well have out with it.”
    A breeze came through the open window and made the hairs rise on Aimée’s arms. She looked around the damp, fireless room. Moisture collected on the walls, and she watched a single pearl of water run down the whitewash. She thought it would be easy to tell her friend the truth about Henri, to describe the submerged remorse and longing that consumed her. But now she found it impossible to speak.
    â€œI have a brother,” she finally said, taking a seat at the table with her elbows propped on the clean gingham tablecloth. “Not Jacques, an older brother. One who left years ago.”
    In a voice soft with emotion, Aimée told Leonie that her brother left during the war. He had a falling out with her papa, she said, and they had not heard from him in three years. For some reason she didn’t try to explain that he wasn’t her real brother. Perhaps she thought it seemed more urgent, if there was actual blood between them, and it was this simple omission that she would return to, later on, as her undoing.
    Leonie rose to her feet and stood listening with the scrub brush held in the air.
    A lost brother sounded wonderfully exciting. Leonie had no siblings. Her papa ran off when she was a baby, and her maman died three years later beneath the hoofs of a mad horse. Leonie’s grand-tante raised her, a hardworking tavern maid who’d made the firm decision to remain unmarried and childless. “No need to sacrifice my life for a man who’ll drink every penny I earn away,” she’d said.
    Except for the three months when Madame Fiavre fell ill from white pox—and Leonie was sent to the workshop in order to put food on the table—her grand-tante had worked every day, making sure Leonie stayed in school until she was sixteen. By the time Madame Fiavre was too old to work in the brasserie, she had a nice stash of money tucked away on the highest shelf of the larder. “It’s the simple things that make for a decent life,” she’d always told Leonie. “Don’t go looking for more, and God will reward you for your humbleness.”
    Leonie had her doubts, but she never said a contradictory word. She’d seen children thrown into the street when there was no one to pay the rent. Drunken mamans stumbling after them, beaten by raging papas and in turn beating their own, sorry children whose starved, swollen faces haunted the avenues of Montmartre.
    No one needed to tell Leonie how lucky she was, and she did everything she could to repay her grand-tante . She took in mending from the washhouse when there was no modeling work, read scripture aloud by firelight, and bought her grand-tante ’s favorite sweets and the best cuts of meat, pounding the meat into a mushy pulp since her grand-tante ’s last two molars had crumbled from her mouth.
    And yet, deep down, Leonie’s life utterly bored her. She listened to Aimée now like a child to a fairy tale, grasping this bit of Savaray drama with relish, thinking how romantic it would be to have a long-lost brother, especially one clever enough to send a message through a painting.
    When Aimée finished, Leonie tossed the scrub brush into the bucket and wiped her hands over the front of her apron, two black smudges appearing down her middle.
    â€œHis name is Henri,” Aimée said. Leonie could hear Aimée’s love for him in the tender way she said it.
    Leonie scurried over, swept her skirt aside, and sat next to Aimée.
    â€œThe question is, how, exactly, are we going to find