“You’re a bit of a lush in France,” Iris says when I finish my second glass and nod when Jacques says, “Encore?”

It’s true. At home, I never exceed the recommended weekly limit. Iris takes pride in so doing even though I’m sure she shouldn’t, given the amount of medication she’s on. And the fact of the MS itself. Alcohol can’t be good for it.

“Alcohol is not the answer to your problems,” I told Kate when that grunting, spotty boy in sixth year broke her heart and I found her in her bedroom, drunk and disheveled.

“Then what is the answer, Mum?” Kate had asked. And she looked at me with her pale, beautiful face streaked with lines of sodden mascara, like she really wanted to know. Like she thought I might know.

I wish I had been honest with her. Instead, I offered a platitude. I can’t even remember what it was. Something like, There’s plenty more fish in the sea. Or You’re only seventeen years old, there’s lots of time, or What’s for you won’t pass you.

Something trite and meaningless.

Instead of the truth, which is there is no answer. Not a simple one anyway. There’s just life, which can be hard, and when it’s not hard, it can be tedious.

But sometimes, there are snatches of joy.

Like here. Now. With the afternoon sun warm on my skin, flushing my face and making my heart beat in a way that insists I’m alive, and watching Iris flirt with Jacques, the way she can make him laugh. Make me laugh. And the sound of my laughter. Louder than people expect. Like my height. People are always surprised when they hear I’m five feet ten. I didn’t think you were that tall. That’s what people say. When they hear.

I went to hug Kate then. I thought, if I could take her in my arms and hold her tight and rock her, like I did when she was my little girl, it might be all right. But she heard my platitude, recognized it for what it was, and she moved away from me. Just a small move, but the space it created between us was a chasm I could no longer reach across.

“Are you okay?” Iris puts her hand on my arm.

“I haven’t always been a good mother,” I say, which sort of shocks me—I didn’t think I was going to say that—and invigorates me, the clarifying truth of it.

Iris considers the statement. “Well,” she says, “if I compare you to Vera, I’d say you were pretty bloody outstanding.” We laugh, and when we stop, I say, in a loud and slightly slurred voice, “I think we should stay here tonight. I want to sleep in a castle.”

Jacques, polishing a glass behind the bar, nods when I say this as if he had been waiting for just such a pronouncement.

“Let’s book in,” I say, jumping off my stool. There is a sway to my stance, as befits a woman who has exceeded her recommended daily limit of alcohol by multiple units in the middle of the afternoon on an empty stomach. I catch sight of myself in the mirror behind the bar, towering over Dad and Iris, like the tall woman that I am. All five feet and ten inches of me.