The sky is naked blue now, sun overhead. It’s shaping up into a scorching day. Vanessa wears a straw hat and dark glasses, but even so, over the course of the morning, Rat can almost see her mother’s freckles multiplying, merging into a sea of rosy brown. Rat tries counting them, before they disappear.

“Buzz off,” says Vanessa, fondly.

“I love your freckles,” says Rat. “Let me see the ones on your arms. Tell me about the time you painted your face with stain remover to make them disappear.”

“Shush. It wasn’t stain remover, it was Wite-Out. Buzz off, I’m working.”

People mill around, picking up objects, putting them down again, circling. When somebody comes to your stall, you can’t help getting your hopes up. Vanessa knows all the habitual customers—who’s likely actually to buy something, who’s just whiling away a Sunday morning. There are a number of foreigners who have vacation homes in the hills around Brix. The foreigners are always nosing around for something picturesque, something typically “French”—straw hats to hang on their wall, enameled coffeepots. There’s one Danish lady who’s crazy about yellow. Anything yellow, she’ll buy it.

That’s the fancy end of the Brix market. The rest is much like the village’s year-round population: rough. Arabs and Gypsies selling bits of cable, dial telephones, ancient radios, homeless-looking people offering old clothes-pegs, school notebooks that have already been written in, roller skates with a wheel missing.

Vanessa chats with the couple at the neighboring stall.

Rat sits by her mother, reading a Lucky Luke.

A man and a woman stop to look at Vanessa’s wares. Rat’s seen them before; they must live in Brix. The woman’s German, but she speaks French perfectly. Today she’s wearing a long batik skirt that leaves her belly bare, revealing a ring in her navel. She has two more rings in her nose, including a big gold hoop.

Her boyfriend is tall. He leans back as he stands, rolling on his hips. He’s always in black, with high-heeled cowboy boots and a thick studded belt, even in the summer. Rat catches Vanessa giving him an oblique once-over.

She nudges her mother. “Cut it out.” She hates it when her mother checks out guys.

“What?” Vanessa, all-innocent.

“You know.”

The woman picks up an enamel jade-green colander, shows it to her boyfriend.

He makes a face. “You need a colander?”

He has a surprisingly high voice for such a tall man. It makes him seem more vulnerable.

“Why not?”

“Look—it’s rusty.”

“It’s pretty. I like the green.” Her German accent is tiny, almost imperceptible, but it accentuates her air of unworldliness. Rat wishes she had a foreign accent, too, so people would always be trying to guess where she came from.