Rooted (Pagano Family #3)(3)

Elegant women and men in designer clothes strode with purpose down the walks and drove luxury cars, high-end scooters, and motorcycles, traveling the streets with the same blatant disregard for traffic law, self-preservation, or common decency of every other driver in Paris.

Izzie had left the keys to their Audi S8, but there was absolutely no way in all the nine hells that Carmen was going to drive that six-figure f*cker in the city of Paris. When it was time to go out into the countryside, they’d take the Metro to the edge of the city, and she’d rent a car from there.

But they’d only been in Paris a week, and there was plenty to do right in the city to keep them occupied for a while. Once Rosa got herself out of bed, that was. Jetlag had laid the girl out, and she’d spent days doing virtually nothing but sleeping and occasionally coming out to the living room to sigh for a while. It had been all Carmen could do to get her to go out for an occasional meal. It was about time to kick that girl up the ass and get her moving. They were in Paris, for f*ck’s sake.

When they’d arrived, Rosa had been giddy. While they’d been planning the trip, she’d been skeptical of the free accommodations, but when she’d seen with her own eyes that they’d be living among well-heeled Parisians, surrounded by shopping and food, she’d bounced up and down in the taxi.

Then she’d seen the apartment itself. It was a typical upscale flat, Carmen thought, in a stately building with an old cage elevator. The ceilings were high, the plasterwork was ornate, the doors were tall and carved. Izzie preferred a more muted palette than Carmen liked, but still, it was warm and classy. Four rooms and a bath—large living room with a fireplace, small kitchen, and two bedrooms, one large and one small. Carmen took the large bedroom, which shared access to the balcony with the living room. The small bedroom was quite small, but had a view of the Eiffel Tower.

When Rosa first walked in, she’d squealed. “Oh. My. Gawd! I feel like Audrey Hepburn!” She’d even done a little pirouette in the middle of the living room.

They’d walked to the Eiffel Tower that first afternoon, browsed through some of the shops on the way back, and had an early dinner at a cute little café. Rosa had been happy and chatty, and Carmen had felt more convinced than ever that she’d made the right choice, bringing her here.

Then Rosa had taken to her bed and slept for approximately ninety percent of her life.

Carmen had felt some jetlag, too, but she’d slept hard that first night and late into the next morning, and then her clock was reset. So she’d been doing Paris mostly on her own for this first week of their summer.

She needed to get her baby sister moving. But frankly, Carmen had enjoyed this week. She preferred her own company above all, and wandering alone through the streets of this magnificent city had been blissful, really. She’d done a lot of things Rosa would have balked at—the Catacombs, for instance. The Shakespeare and Company bookstore. Notre Dame. A day spent simply walking along the Seine until her feet gave out. Had she dragged Rosa along, those days would have been ruined by her endless complaints.

She’d also made it her mission to scout out the cafés, patisseries, and the like around their flat to figure out which had the best offerings and atmosphere. Usually, she’d been able to get Rosa out for a meal and a little bit of shopping, just an hour or two before she was back to yawning and sighing.

It really was time to get her in gear. The whole point of bringing Rosa to Europe was to get her out in the world and broaden her outlook a little.

Tomorrow. Carmen would let her sleep through this night, and then she’d shake her out of that comforter in the morning, and they would take on the Louvre and some gardens. At least.

For tonight, though, the thought of a nice meal, a good wine, and a good book at the little café she’d decided was her favorite so far sounded like a lovely end to a beautiful, solitary day in Paris.



oOo



Café Aphrodite sat on the corner across the street, at the end of Izzie’s block, but Carmen hadn’t tried it out until the third day. Since then, she’d eaten there four times. It was the perfect blend of good atmosphere and good food.

The side walls were lined with books and odd little knickknacks, many of which had the kitschy feel of knock-off antiquity. The ceiling was mirrored. The back wall was bottles of wine shelved from floor to ceiling. A small bar took up space at about the middle of the room. A ten-foot tall marble fountain of Aphrodite herself, standing nude and glorious in her shell, dominated the center of the interior. There had been risk in this design of tending toward tacky. But the effect was instead cozy.

Though about fifteen small tables were perched within a low, wrought-iron railing on the sidewalk, and Carmen had enjoyed a couple of meals people-watching out there, on this night, she decided to sit indoors with her tablet. She had taken it as a challenge to finally get through David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest during this trip. She’d been a fan of DFW since she’d come across a hilarious article of his in The Atlantic several years ago, and she thought she had read all of his published works but one. Infinite Jest was his most famous—and, in Carmen’s opinion, two hundred pages into his thousand-plus-page brick of a postmodern masterpiece, his most ponderous. The footnotes in this one were going to drive her insane.

Her reading tastes tended toward the literary, especially the contemporary literary stuff. But she liked the classics, too. Virginia Woolf was her favorite author. She’d enjoyed studying literature in school, and had danced around the idea of majoring in English for a while, but then she’d taken an upper-division course with a professor who’d insisted that texts had only one correct reading. Carmen didn’t like to have her own view of texts or the world wrangled so narrowly. So she’d majored in philosophy instead.