“I saw you,” says a voice at her back. Rat swirls around to find William grinning at her. William’s short, with a walrus mustache and a compact belly. He and Josiane are brocanteurs from Elne. Rat and William, and then William and Vanessa, exchange kisses.

“Still no shoes, huh?” says William, jerking a head towards Rat.

“Frankly, it’s not worth the fight. She’s a savage, what can I do? The most annoying part is, she’s never a day sick.”

“What’s your teacher say when you show up barefoot?”

Rat wriggles, uncomfortable. “I wear shoes to school. And when I take them off at recess, she says, Put your shoes back on. That’s why I don’t like to go.”

William stares at her a moment, then turns to Vanessa. “Hey-ho, my girl. I’ve got something for you.”

They follow William to his van, where Josiane’s unloading, and he hauls out a carton of magazines. Twelve years of Paris Matches, ’84 to ’96. Complete set. Mint condition.

“Nice,” Vanessa says appreciatively. Rat watches her mother whisk through them, counting, checking there are no pages missing.

“How much?”

“I’ll give ’em to you for what I got ’em for. Soon as I saw them, I thought, Vanessa.”

He names the price. Rat can tell Vanessa knows he’s added a little, but she agrees.

“I’ll pay you at the end of the day, okay? You’re a gem, William. Josiane, your man’s a gem. If you ever get tired of him, you can pass him on to me.”

“How much will you pay me for him?” Josiane winks at Rat.

“He looks pretty used.”

“A wreck,” pronounces William. “After seventeen years with that old witch, I’m a wreck.”

“It’s not seventeen. Is it really seventeen? William, you can’t count.”

“You should have seen me when I was a spring chicken. Before she got to plucking me, before she wrang my neck.” William does a little dance, clicking his feet like a rooster chasing a hen, to show how perky he used to be. They all laugh, except for Josiane, who’s still trying to puzzle out how long she and William have been together.

The brocanteurs are like one big family. People look out for one another. Everybody knows Vanessa’s crazy about old magazines. Fashion magazines, movie magazines, people magazines. She’ll read anything: rock stars’ bouts in rehab, television anchormen’s beach houses, celebrity funerals. What she likes best is reading about the old stars from her childhood, and their children—Chiara Mastroianni, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Julie Depardieu. When the lead singer of Noir Désir murdered Jean-Louis Trintignant’s daughter in a hotel room, that was Vanessa’s kind of story. Some people might call it morbid, but Vanessa says it’s just human.