Tristan says, “What story about ghosts in Austria? Watch the road, Maman. What story about ghosts?” She knows he will persist, never forget, not for one day of their vacation.

“It was in a castle,” Flo says, “a really old spooky castle that used to be a big deal, like a king or a count used to live there or something. And Daddy was there. I think they were engaged then. Were you engaged to Daddy then? Please tell it, Mom.”

This is new, Flo calling her Mom instead of Maman, and Marie-Claude hates it.

She wonders how Flo can know about Austria. Sometimes it feels there is nothing about her life her children cannot uncover, cannot redefine. Once she had thought there would be a certain amount of grace and mystery in being a parent and that what went unsaid about her experiences would be respected and what was revealed would be absorbed without contradiction, occasionally sanctified. Wasn’t that how she had treated her own parents’ pasts? Perhaps it is because they have become American, these children of hers.

“You two tell me stories. I’m tired of talking.”

“No,” says Flo. “Tell the ghost story. Please, Mom, please. Please!”

Tristan joins in, and Marie-Claude lets them continue far past the point at which she’d assumed they’d stop, until their chanting unsettles her more than the idea of telling another story. “Okay,” she says. “Okay.”

“Your father wasn’t with me then,” she begins. “I hadn’t even met him.” She tries but fails to conceal the pleasure she takes in this fact. “I went with my cousin Giselle. She had been invited by her best friend at boarding school in Lausanne, Sigrid. The ball was just outside Linz at a palace that had once belonged to a Habsburg archduke, Franz or Friedle or someone, one of Francis the First’s sixteen children. The palace was later confiscated when the imperial family was forced out of the country by the new government. Eventually, it was resold to this Sigrid’s grandparents. I didn’t know much of the history. I just knew that Giselle traveled with a pack of rich friends and that Sigrid wasn’t the only one who could throw a party in her own castle. And I was a bit more like your father then. I loved big houses and beautiful clothes.”

“He does not,” Flo says, but even in her irritation at one of her mother’s jabs, she can’t muster up enough conviction to pursue an argument. She has already begun to notice how her father seems more pleased when she plays at Janine’s house with the pool than at Bree’s apartment.