The frame had always hung crooked.
Not enough for anyone to notice on entering the dining room, but enough to irritate Camille every time she passed the sideboard. The right corner sagged two or three millimeters, as though the wall itself had given up holding the house together. That morning she put the stack of folders on the table, took the frame by its black sides, and straightened it without thinking.
“Don’t touch that with your dusty hands,” her mother said.
Camille looked at her palms. They were clean. Her mother, on the other hand, had had a gray streak on her cheek since emptying the linen cupboard.
“Thanks for the expert opinion.”
Anne let it pass. She had already returned to her inventory, marker in hand, bent over three boxes labeled DISHES, PAPERS, and TO DECIDE in the upright handwriting that had prompted generations of students to correct their own. At sixty-eight, she retained the same gift for making a problem seem manageable the moment it had been assigned a box.
The house at Les Ormes fit into none of them.
In the kitchen, the dishwasher hummed pointlessly: only four plates remained to be washed, but Anne refused to run it half empty and also refused to wash them by hand. On the front steps, Julien was talking to the roofer. Whenever the man raised his voice, they heard “slates,” “roof timbers,” or a figure Camille preferred not to remember. July’s rain had opened a stain on the landing ceiling. The stain had spread to the blue bedroom. The blue bedroom had made a decision urgent that the whole family had been putting off since Jeanne’s death three years earlier.
Sell, rent, repair, keep: four verbs, no money.
Camille took down the portrait.
“Camille.”
“I’m putting it down. That’s all.”
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