Rat is mollified. She lets him order her a grenadine. She drinks it in one go, and then fishes for a couple of ice cubes from the bucket on his table and crunches them.

“Don’t you know you shouldn’t chew ice?” says the man. “It fucks up your teeth.”

“My teeth are already fucked up,” says Rat, putting down the glass and walking off.

The man says something she doesn’t catch, and she hears them all laughing.

Back at her mother’s stall, somebody’s just agreed on a price for the giraffe lamp Vanessa picked up in Alénya. Rat means to tell Vanessa about the grenadine. She’s not supposed to accept things from strangers, especially not male strangers, but sometimes she forgets.

When they get back home late that afternoon, Rat and Vanessa stack the cartons of unsold goods in the shed. The take was pretty piddling, once you subtract the mileage. Less than Vanessa clears when she helps out at the Sol y Mar. But it was fun being up in the mountains for the day. Coming back down to the plain, the neon-blazing malls and fast-food chains feel hot and dirty.

Rat fans her mother with a broken-spanned fan she found in the parking lot behind the market.

Vanessa yawns and stretches luxuriantly. “I’m going to have a long cool shower, and then I’m going to read my magazines. Bliss.”

In the event, the blissful evening gets spoiled, because Souad’s boss calls to tell Vanessa that Souad’s back in intensive care, and that’s the first time Rat remembers hearing her mother cry, but not the last.

Chapter 4

Morgan’s mother, Souad, was Vanessa’s best friend.

Afterwards, it will be hard for Rat to disentangle her memories of Souad well from Souad dying, hard to picture her other than how she looked the last couple of months, curled up on the hospice bed, blackened skin shriveled tight across her body, and eye sockets gaping.

Vanessa and Souad had struck up acquaintance outside the preschool in Saint Féliu. This was when Jérôme’s mother had gone back to her nursing job full-time, and Vanessa was taking care of Solenne while Marielle was at work. Souad’s son, Morgan, was in the same starter class of Touts Petits as Solenne.

Saint Féliu wasn’t a friendly village. Most of the school parents didn’t bother to say hello, even though you’d been waiting outside the gates together day after day for years.

One day Vanessa said to Rat, “There’s another mother at the preschool I like the look of,” and when she pointed her out, Rat was surprised. The woman was tall and gaunt as a man, with a great head of frizzy red hair and a hollow, haunted face.

“What do you like about her?” Rat had asked, and Vanessa replied, “Her face looks lived-in.”