Thwack! Janet cracked one over the top of his head. Janet was strong, she was built more like Dad than like Mom. She could give you the worst Indian wrist burn ever. She had arm-wrestled our sixteen-year-old cousin Paul into red-faced ignominy. These poor boys thought they were following one more silly tourist who would giggle at their advances. Wrong number! And great was their fall. As the first boy’s knees buckled, he had an expression of rapt and surprised attention on his pleasant olive-skinned face. When Janet turned the wooden clog on edge and clipped the second boy smartly on the bridge of his nose, he wordlessly slid down the wall of the small cheese store we were next to and carefully settled his face in his hands where he no doubt began to rethink all the received wisdom of Italian manhood. The third boy, the tall, handsome one, made the classic mistake of the French Army in World War II, he defended the wrong place at the wrong time, leaving his flank open. Janet, with a sweeping underarm softball pitching swing, gave his “Christmas presents” a resounding uppercut. This made him grip his testicles as he doubled over, and that was the very moment that he should have left his hands where they’d been, on top of his head, because Janet’s next blow was an arching tennis serve that slammed down on the back of his head, now bowed in reverent pain.

As we ran back the way we had come, we passed the French girls. They were now walking arm in arm with their “attackers” and were gigging.

No such foolery for us! Rachael might have talked to the unfortunate boys, but not Janet! No one even got to peek at her presents let alone a tug at the ribbons.

Chapter 6