Free Secrets of Paris by Luanne Rice Page B

hands on the linen towel. Patrice left the kitchen. Kelly could not hear where she went. The massive stone architecture kept sound, like heat, from penetrating the walls. Garments she had yet to iron hung in a small closet off the kitchen. Taking down her uniform, Kelly realized that of all her household chores, she disliked ironing most. And she realized the irony of that dislike,considering the pleasures ironing had given her in her early life.
    When she was young, five or six years old, the whole family worked for Pan Am. The great American airline hired Kelly’s parents to launder their linen. White napkins, tiny pillowcases, aprons, summer-weight cotton blankets. Kelly’s father and brothers would drive to the airport in Manila to pick up the soiled linen and deliver the clean; the women would wash and iron it.
    Sometimes they worked inside the house, but more often outdoors, under the hot blue sky. She remembered the three large iron cauldrons boiling over coal fires, steam wisping into the hot air. Annette and Ingrid had charge of stirring the laundry with clean sticks. Marie-Vic, Darlene, and Sophia would wring it out with their bare hands and pin it to clotheslines. In the rainy season they strung lines inside the house and fanned it with paddles.
    Along with Pan Am’s laundry they washed large white sheets to lay on the dirt—the floor of their house and their entire yard had been dirt then. Kelly’s sisters would toss the clean linen on one sheet, and her mother would sit cross-legged on another, a large pillow on her lap. And she would iron on that pillow. Kelly had loved watching her.
    Absently Kelly lifted the iron she was now using, to test its weight. How light it felt compared to that iron of her mother’s! Her mother’s iron was enormous and round, hollow and filled with coal. She had to constantly change hands, because it was so heavy. After work, Annette would rub her mother’s shoulders with eucalyptus sap. Everyone would be lying on the sheets then, resting and talking. Her older sisters would tell about college, about nice American servicemen they had met: topics that would please their mother, who would smile and say everyone had to work hard to earn money so they could all move to the States and open a fish market.
    Kelly finished ironing her uniform. The white collar was starched stiff as cardboard, just as Didier liked it. Unplugging the iron, she remembered the best part of ironing Pan Am’s laundry. At the end of the day, after the iron had cooled, Kelly’s mother had let her blow the coal ashes out of it. She remembered blowing into the tube, watching the silver ash fly out the trap door. She remembered the gritty, twinkly feeling of ash on her cheeks and in her eyelashes. And she remembered how, every time she did it, her mother would smile and call her “Tinkerbell.”

    Didier d’Origny gripped the champagne cork with a white linen towel, twisted, and let a wisp of vapor escape the bottle. He filled four glasses, turning the bottle as he poured, to avoid spilling a drop. The room was silent except for the sigh of air as the cork was removed, then the bubbles fizzing in the glasses. The evening was off to a festive start. Lydie glanced over at Michael, tried to see him as the others would: lean, thirty-five, curly brown hair that needed to be cut, a mouth that smiled easily, and eyes that took everything in.
    “To health,” Didier said, raising his glass.
    “Health,” said Lydie, Michael, and Patrice in unison, smiling, clinking glasses, and drinking.
    “So,” Didier said, setting down his glass. “Have you explored the Champagne region of France?”
    “We spent one of our first weekends there,” Michael said.
    “I loved those underground caves, where they age the wine,” Lydie said, remembering walking down one hundred steps into a dim, damp clay-walled chamber lined with racks of champagne.
    “Marvelous caves,” Didier said. His expression was kind, but a little