Upcountry was more primitive: plummier prizes, but harder to dislodge. You’d go into a bar and chat up the regulars, you’d look at the announcements in the tabac, see who’d died and who was selling, but you had to proceed on tiptoe. Vanessa was always hoping to chance on some old pack rat who was moving into a retirement home, and wondering what to do with sixty years’ worth of TV guides and jam jars. Once she and Max had heard about a man who’d just inherited his great-uncle’s farm. They’d followed this dirt track all the way up to some godforsaken shack in the Aspres, and guess what happened? The guy set his dog on them! In some people’s minds, a brocanteur is just a sharkier kind of thief.

For the most part, though, it was pleasant work. Vanessa sometimes called it fishing, sometimes foraging. If Vanessa had her choice, she’d be high-end, someone who dealt in lace nightdresses and china teacups, not someone who got dogs sicced on her, but the Pyrénées-Orientales was a poor, bargain-basement end of the country—hot Siberia, joked Vanessa—and you took what you could get.

Clear road now, and the rising sun is just beginning to tinge the dark gray mountains and hilltop villages with gold.

Rat feels cozy in the van, just her and Vanessa. It’s her favorite place to talk, an enclosed realm of parallel daydreaming, where she can get her mother to slow down and answer all the questions, tell the stories she’s usually too busy for. In the van, you’re safe, everybody who’s in it is strapped tight, there to stay. If it were up to Rat, they’d live in it full-time, sleep there every night, the way they did in Morocco.

“Mama? Will you tell me a story?” She makes her voice deliberately babylike, entreating.

“What kind of story?”

“A story from your childhood.”

“What childhood?” Vanessa retorts. “You have a childhood; I never had one.”

Vanessa was an army brat. She’d grown up all over France and Germany, wherever her father was posted. They never lived anywhere more than three years. When her father left the military, they moved to a condo in Collioure which Vanessa’s parents had bought for their retirement. Vanessa’s older sister was already married by then, and Vanessa was a teenager. It was her first real home.

“What was Mémé Catherine like when you and Marie-Christine were kids?” Rat asks. Hesitantly, because they don’t speak to Rat’s French granny anymore.