I’d never thought of it that way before. “So then she’s the chevalier, when she tells these tales?”
“That’s what I think.” Denise filled her piping bag carefully, gave it a twist at the top, and began to pipe almond paste onto the puff pastry, filling the king cake.
I watched her with interest, wondering how she’d developed such a detailed knowledge of such a curious subject. In the end, I simply asked her.
With a shrug she said, “I wrote a paper on it once, at university. I loved studying literature, back then. I planned to one day teach it.”
“Really?” That surprised me.
“Really. But I never finished university.”
“Why not?” I asked. “What happened?”
“Noah happened.” Glancing over, she took one look at my face and added, “No, it’s fine. I didn’t mind. I could have gone back afterwards and finished, but by then I’d stumbled into doing this.” She spread her hands, the gesture taking in the whole room. “When I was younger I always worked summers for my aunt and uncle at their hotel, I enjoyed it. And soon after Noah was born one of Luc’s friends was starting a restaurant and needed some help with the cooking, so I said I’d help. I enjoyed that, as well. And then one of the waiters, his mother came out of the hospital and needed someone to help cook and clean for her, so…” She shrugged again, turning to roll out more pastry. “I like this. I’m happy.”
“But you might have been happy,” I pointed out, “being a teacher.”
“It’s possible. But we all change, you know? When other people come into our lives, our priorities change. This is perfect for Noah,” she said, “this arrangement. He comes home at lunch if he likes, and I’m here when he gets home from school, and I’m here on the days that he’s ill.”
I’d never had to arrange my own life around somebody else’s routine, or their needs, so I thought about this for a moment. When I had been Noah’s age, I’d gone next door to my neighbors most days after school and had stayed there till either my mother or father had come home from work. It had never occurred to me that, for those few years, my parents had probably had to arrange that, to make sure that I was looked after, since I’d been too young to be left on my own in the house for so long. Just like Noah. “So where does he go after school on the weeks that he lives with his father?” He didn’t come here, I knew.
“This is a Wednesday,” Denise said, “so Luc will be working from home. On the other days, Noah goes to play at a friend’s house. His best friend, Michelle. They’re like this.” She held up two fingers pressed tightly together. “She’s quite a character, Michelle. You’ll see that when you meet her.”
I sometimes found it hard to keep pace with the easy way she shifted subjects. “I’m meeting Noah’s best friend? When?”
“It will be soon, I would imagine. Noah likes when all the people in his life know one another.” She looked at her hands for a moment and frowned and crossed over to where I sat, holding her hand out to show me the jumble of tiny and colorful ceramic figurines. By tradition, the galette des rois had a single fève hidden inside it—the French word for “bean.” In the old days, I gathered, it had been an actual bean, but as time had gone on it had slowly evolved to a small figurine. In the king cakes that I had been served at my neighbors’ house during my childhood, the fève they’d used year after year had been Mickey Mouse, which I’d adored. And I’d twice found the fève in my own piece of cake, meaning I’d been the “queen” for the dinner that year, and been able to wear the gold foil card crown Ricky’s mother kept tucked in a drawer, and had chosen my “king”—always Ricky, of course, out of loyalty—and for those few hours had felt very special.
Denise asked, “Which of these should I put in the king cake for Noah?” There must have been more than a dozen fèves cupped in her hand. “I have two little robots, a blue and a red one, or else there’s this soldier. Which one do you think—?”
“The cat,” I said. “It looks just like Diablo.”
“So it does. I didn’t even notice him. All right, then, it’s the cat.”
I watched her take the little figurine and press it gently down into the filling of the king cake before fitting on the final round of pastry. “But how,” I asked, “can you be certain that Noah will get that piece?”
“I just do this.” She was marking out shapes on the top of the cake with the tines of a fork, and she made a small extra mark over the spot where she’d hidden the fève.
“Oh.” It made me think back to my childhood again, to the things that I’d thought had been random that actually weren’t.
“I’ve been thinking,” Denise said. “This girl with the diary, this Mary Dundas. You said that before her brother brought her here to Chatou, she was living with her aunt and uncle, yes? And not her parents?”
“Yes. I think, from how she writes about her mother, that her mother’s dead.”
“Which means her father also must be dead, or else he’s left her for some reason with her aunt and uncle. And her brother, now he’s also left her.” With the cake set to the side, she started tidying the worktop, clearing all the small unwanted scraps away. “There’s a thing, you know, when children are abandoned by the people that they love. It’s psychological. They start to feel they can’t be very lovable, that nobody will want them as they are, and so they try to act like someone who they’re not. Maybe her stories are a part of this.”