EMMIE SAYS

David Obuchowski

         I’d made up my mind years ago that I was finally going to get a Peugeot, and when I did, I realized that as much as the 505 was the model that made me fall in love with the marque, the 405 was the one I wanted. In particular, the Mi16 version, which sported a high-revving four-cylinder engine mated to a five-speed that produced an impressive 150 horsepower and topped out at almost as many miles per hour. It should have been the car that kept Peugeot in the States. Instead, it was its last spectacular gasp, and in 1991, Peugeot bid farewell to America.

Five years ago, I finally bought one. A 1989 Mi16 the color of a cumulus cloud. It took years to find one without any rust or dents, and when I finally did, I had to sell my beloved 1970 Opel GT—a somewhat rare little car that, to those who aren’t familiar with it, would look like a very small, slightly bizarre Corvette. My soon-to-be-ex-wife fucking hated that car, and she hates the 405, too.

She’d hate the 405 even more if she knew where it was made. Sochaux, France. The town Emmie grew up in. Twenty seven years ago, when we were all seniors in high school and Missy and I were dating, she was sure I had a hopeless crush on Emmie. And as much as I refused to ever admit it, she was right.

Emmie, which was short for Emmanuelle, was the exchange student our family hosted 27 years ago, and who I haven’t seen since. Emmie, who shared a room with my twin sister, Jen, and who continues to be one of Jen’s closest friends. Jen works in Manhattan now. She’s a managing director at a Swiss bank. Can’t get much higher on the corporate ladder than a managing director, I’ve come to learn. See, I thought vice president was supposed to be an impressive title, but what do I know? I’m just a mechanic who never left his hometown. Jen got promoted past vice president more than five years ago, and now she owns a whole brownstone in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.

We’re doing Christmas back at our parents’ house. Mine is too depressing, and Jen’s is a little too small and a little too far. And Emmie is excited to stay in the old place after all these years. Jen had tried to send a car to pick up Emmie from the airport, but Emmie refused. She wanted to take the train instead. This was her first time back since high school, and taking the train reminded her of when she and Jen would take the train to go watch shows at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, or go shopping for CDs and t-shirts in the Village.

So, Jen asked me if I wouldn’t mind picking up Emmie from the train station. I made it seem like I’d have to really move some things around to make it happen, like it would be a bit of a hassle.

“It’s a crazy time of the year. I got a full lot. But,” I sighed, “I mean, I guess I can probably figure it out,” I said.

But Jen knows me too well to fall for my act. “You’re welcome, Paul.”

So, today’s the day I’m picking up Emmie and, of course, I’m driving the Mi16. I can only assume Emmie knows that they made these cars in her hometown, but then again what do I know? I’m not well-traveled like Jen or Emmie. I’ve never been to France. For all I know, Sochaux is a giant metropolis filled with theaters and art museums and countless unforgettable restaurants, and the factory’s just tucked away somewhere in the outskirts, unknown to most of its residents.

As I make my way down 202, I rehearse. This is crazy, but it turns out that this car was actually made in Sochaux. Isn’t that close to where you’re from? Oh, you’re actually FROM Sochaux?! See, I KNEW that sounded familiar!

No, there’s no way she’d believe that I didn’t remember where she’s from.

OK, so this is just a crazy coincidence, but this car was actually made in your hometown! Can you believe that? Yeah, I had no idea.

Would she believe that? Would she really believe that I had no idea? Even in high school, I was obsessed with cars. Of course I would have known where it was built. I press the blunt tip of my left pointer finger into the steering wheel. It’s a nervous habit. Whenever I feel self-conscious or stressed, I press that finger into my thumb or whatever hard surface happens to be on-hand.

Maybe I should just act like it was kismet. As soon as I saw that this car was built in Sochaux, I realized IT’S A SIGN, and I bought it.

Jesus, no. No way. Too much.

Suddenly, I’m overcome with embarrassment that I’ve driven this car, that I even own it at all. It’s too obvious. I should have just taken my other car, left this at home, out of sight, in the garage. Of course, that wouldn’t work either because, without a doubt, Jen or one of my parents would have brought up the fact that I own a Peugeot. And then what? Then I’d have to play it off like I just forgot to mention that I own an extremely rare French sedan to our very fucking French guest who used to live with us? Jesus Christ, why don’t I just wear a fucking shirt that says I’VE NEVER STOPPED THINKING ABOUT YOU?

I park in one of the diagonal spots along the side of the station, and I check the time. It’s not even two o’clock yet. I had left early, afraid of being late. But now I’m at the station with twenty minutes to wait, and I’m wondering what to do with myself.

         I take my time climbing up the steps and then I head for the platform where her train will arrive. A couple of teenagers are sitting on a bench with peeling green paint. They look at me looking at them, and then they crane their necks to see if anyone else is watching. Satisfied with what they see—or don’t see—they begin kissing each other sloppily, voraciously. It’s loud and the sound is wet and almost nauseating. He squeezes her thigh with one hand and then, with the other, begins pawing at her breasts over her sweater but beneath her jacket. She responds by reaching between his legs and rubbing his crotch from the outside of his jeans.

         I turn away partly as a courtesy, and partly out of secondhand embarrassment. And once again, I find myself pressing the tip of my finger pointer with its oddly flat, tough surface into the side of the knuckle of my thumb.

         “Come back with me, come back with me,” I hear him plead with her.

         “I can’t. You know I can’t. Just come again tomorrow, OK?”

         “Fuck, Missy. Just come back with me,” he tells her, exasperated. I have to smile because Missy shares a name with my wife. In fact, growing up, it felt like half the girls I knew were named Melissa, and they all went by Missy. Good to know it’s still going strong. A real New Jersey tradition.

         “I told you, I can’t,” she says with an edge. There are no meek Missys.

         “You’re still seeing him.”

         “I’m dealing with it.”

         “Well fucking deal with it faster,” he says, his voice raised. I turn and look back at them, but he’s already storming off.

         “Tommy!” she calls after him.

         “Call me when you dump him,” he shouts back without so much as turning his head.

         “Tommy!” she calls back again. But this time he doesn’t answer. And now she’s crying. It actually enters my mind that maybe I should ask her if she’s okay. But before I can even begin to evaluate that idea, she looks at me and says, “What the fuck are you looking at?”

         “Nothin’,” I say, trying to chuckle. “I’m just waiting on a train.”

         “Asshole,” she says as she stands up, and then she storms off, too.

Maybe that’s another thing Missys have in common—they can’t stand me.

And now I’m the only one on the platform. I look at my phone. It’s five after two. I can’t believe I’m less than ten minutes away from seeing Emmie. I rub my thumb against the blunt edge of my finger nervously.

         I take advantage of the empty platform and last remaining minutes by rehearsing how I’ll react when I see her emerge from the train car.

         Hey, stranger!

         Bonjour, old friend!

         Look who it is!

         Emmie! My God, it’s so good to see you.

         No. That’s too direct. I’ve got to keep it light. She’ll almost certainly say something nice, and my plan is to deflect with a self-effacing comment. Not sure if I should make a crack about my hair, which has gone gray, or my waistline, which has added a few inches in the intervening years. Maybe both.

         The train arrives at fourteen minutes past the hour and I’m shocked at how many people pour out. I’m standing in the middle of the platform, which is almost instantaneously filled by commuters who are now all hustling toward the exit. I’d had it in my mind that I would spot Emmie emerging from a train car, and I’d jog up to her and help with her luggage. Instead, I’m caught in the scrum, and I’m trying to just push myself up against the stone wall of the ticketing office, removing myself as a bottleneck, or perhaps to keep myself from being carried off by the current.

         I catch snippets of chatter between travelers, small clips of conversations from commuters on their phones. They all run together into a nonsensical but highly stressful soliloquy of sorts. Told the fucking traffic’s gonna be well I don’t care she can say whatever the hell three goddamned invoices and now they’re Christ I’m dreading it…

         And just as quickly, they’re gone. I wonder if Emmie has exited the station and is wandering the parking lot. Before I go in search of her, I look up and down the platform, and that’s when I see her on the bench with the peeling green paint. She has a large purse on her lap, and a single red medium-sized suitcase on wheels.

         “Hey! Emmie!” I call, and I find myself in a full jog to where she’s sitting.

         She stands up and turns toward me. While she appears so much the same as she did before, it’s her smile that also makes me feel like I really did forget what she looked like. It’s a full, unforced, uninhibited smile—as if she might burst into laughter. “Paul,” she says in a way that makes me hope for one moment that maybe she is actually somewhat excited to see me. I plunge my left hand into my coat pocket, and give her a quick, loose, half-hug with my right arm. And then we do a little who-goes-first dance before I gesture for her to walk ahead of me, and she does.

        “A Peugeot,” Emmie says as she settles into the oxblood leather seat of the 405. She sounds so surprised, it almost seems like she’s disoriented.

        “You noticed.”

         “I did. And I am shocked. Even in France, this model is so rare now!” she says.

         “You know this—” I start to ask.

         “A quatre cent cinq,” Emmie says.

         “A what what what?” I ask her.

         “That’s how you say 405 in French,” she giggles.

         “Ah, well, this isn’t just any old cats-in-sink,” I say, “This is an Mi16.”

         “Is that how you say it?” she asks me with a smile. “Em-eye-sixteen?”

         “Uh huh. At least it is in English,” I tell her. Then I realize I’m speaking with an actual French person who happened to immediately and accurately identify my car. I clear my throat and ask, “Why? Do they say it differently in France?”

         “Yes,” she tells me. But before I can ask her how they pronounce it, she puts her hand on the plastic dashboard. “You know, my uncle probably made this dashboard. And my cousins probably installed the engine and the transmission of this car.”

And now it’s me who is genuinely shocked. “Are you kidding me?” 

“I’m not,” she says, but she suddenly looks sad. “We lost my uncle. I was very close with him. My cousins, I am not even sure where they live anymore. I think one is Strasbourg. The other…somewhere in the South. It’s been so long. I live in Paris now. You know, I used to hate Sochaux so much. I was so glad to come here in high school. But now that I’ve lived in Brussels and Berlin and Paris, I miss it.”

“Sochaux?” I ask her.

“Or maybe I don’t miss it. Maybe I just finally appreciate it.”

“Jesus Christ, I feel like such a loser right now,” I tell her.

Emmie nearly flinches when she hears me say this. “Why do you say that?”

“Brussels, Berlin, Paris. My sister is in New York raking in the dough. I never left this fucking town. I don’t have the chance to mourn it or miss it or even appreciate it. I just stayed here like a fucking—” I stop myself from going on.

“Maybe that makes you smarter than the rest of us. You didn’t go searching for some big grand adventure. You just stayed here and made a life,” Emmie says with a stern conviction.

I shift from third to fourth and I nod. “Hey, if nothing else, I have a cool car.”

“It’s a very cool car,” she agrees. “But what about the Opel GT?”

“You remember I wanted one of those?”

“Of course, I do,” she says.

         So, I tell her I did get one, but that I sold it when I came across the 405. I make it sound like the opportunity just fell into my lap—not that I actively searched for one for years. And then I start going on about how it’s actually not as hard as a lot of people think it would be to find parts for the Peugeot. Then I realize how I’m droning on and on and I catch myself. “Jesus, Emmie, it’s crazy to see you again. It really is. How was your flight?”

         “Lovely. I flew business class. Lots of space. Lots of wine. Nothing to complain about,” she says with an easy sigh. She looks around at the town speeding past her. “The town. It’s so much the same, isn’t it?”

         “Mostly. Some new restaurants. They leveled that little mall we all used to go to for pizza. Now it’s condos. Expensive ones.”

         Emmie gasps—nothing overly dramatic, but it’s definitely sincere. “Oh no. I was hoping to go back there, have a slice like old times. Pepperoni and mushroom.”

         “Is that what you liked?” I ask her, as if I don’t remember it, as if I don’t even, to this day, get a pepperoni and mushroom slice for myself from time to time just because of Emmie.

         “Yes. And do you still get sausage?”

         “I do. But, to be honest, I’m trying to keep away entirely,” I tell her as I pat my stomach.

         “You have earned it, Paul,” she says. “Jen tells me you are the best mechanic in the county. And successful, too.”

         “She said that?” I ask her, genuinely touched.

         Emmie nods. “I thought you were going to be a chef. Wasn’t that your dream?”

         I shift uncomfortably in my seat, curl my left hand over the steering wheel in a way that I hope it hides the tip of my finger. I clear my throat. “That’s a tough career,” I say. “I’ve always been better with a wrench than a…” I clear my throat again and don’t finish the sentence.

Emmie blushes and she clears her throat, too. “Really wanted a slice from the old pizza place,” she says.

         I’m relieved by the shift back to the topic of the long-closed pizzeria. “You’re about ten years too late on that one, I’m afraid. Anyways, I imagine Jen is going to want to whisk you away to Cobble Hill.”

         “Yes. She’s told me all about it. Have you been?”

         “A few times,” I say.

         “Do you think I will like it?”

         I think about its stately brownstones, the restaurants and boutiques on Smith Street. “Sure, you will. You and Jen. You’re,” but here I’m unsure of not only what word I want to say, but what I even mean. There’s some part of me that just wants to finish the sentence with, better than me.

         “What are we?”

         “I don’t know,” I say. “Sophisticated. Cultured.”

         Emmie puts her hand on my shoulder. “Paul, you are so nice.”

         “Thanks,” I tell her with a little dismissive laugh.

         “I mean it. You always have been,” Emmie says. Her hand is still on my shoulder, and she’s squeezing it a bit. “And, you know, these days…”

         I look over at her, and I think I catch her looking at my left hand on the steering wheel, but I’m not entirely sure.

         “Sophisticated? Cultured? What do these things mean?” she asks me rhetorically. Then she sighs. “You can keep a car like this running even though it’s almost 40 years old. People come to you and their cars don’t work and when they get them back, they work.”

         I nod, but I’m not quite following.

         “The world is growing helpless, and yet,” she slides her hand off my shoulder and slaps her thigh with it, “we’re glad about it. I login to my email now, and I don’t even need to read it. This stupid AI thing just summarizes it for me. But if my clutch goes out, who will fix it, Paul? Who?”

         “I mean—”

         But Emmie doesn’t even let me answer. “People like you,” she says, and she sounds genuinely worked up about it. “So, I ask you. Who is sophisticated?”

         “Um… I am?”

         “Oh,” Emmie says, and she bites her lip. “I was going to say nobody is—that sophistication is a myth. But, sure, yes, let’s go with you. That’s nicer.”

         And with that, we’re both laughing, and as I pull into my parents’ driveway, I’m not thinking at all about the tip of my finger.

         I carry Emmie’s luggage into my parents’ house. I walk into the front door, and turn to ask Emmie if it looks the same as it did way back when. But she’s not there. Instead, she’s standing in the front yard, gazing up at the two trees—a maple and an oak.

         She notices me looking at her, and she smiles. “They are taller, the trees.”

         “Are they?” I ask.

         “Mmm, yes,” she says, sounding sincerely delighted. “It’s been a long time.”

         “I figured they were already full-grown.”

         “I bet they have hundreds of years left,” Emmie says with a relaxed sigh.

         “Come on in. My parents are going to be very excited to see you.”

         She smiles broadly and makes her way up the front walk, joining me in the foyer.

         “Mom! Pop! I brought a French woman home!” I call out. But there’s no response. I look at her and shrug. “I’ll put your stuff in your room,” I tell her. “Make yourself at home.”

         “I am home,” she says.

         When I come back downstairs, I find Emmie in the kitchen, looking at the cabinets and the appliances in the same way she’d been looking at the tree. She holds up a handwritten note and summarizes it for me. “Your parents went to the grocery store. They’ll be home soon.”

         I chuckle. “I think they’ve gone to the grocery store every day this week, because they keep thinking of some snack or vegetable or dessert you’ll like. I swear, they’re dying to see you, Emmie.”

         “That’s sweet,” she says. “I’m excited to see them. And Jen.” And then she adds, “and Missy, of course.”

         I know she’s just saying that to be nice. “Well, you won’t be seeing her, I’m afraid. She’s going to spend Christmas with her folks. They’re getting, you know,” I look down at the floor and clear my throat, “older.” And then I lie and tell her, “But she says hi.”

         And now, since we’re both just freely exchanging lies, she says, “That’s too bad. Tell her I said hi, would you, Paul?”

         “Sure thing,” I say even though we both know I won’t.

“New oven and refrigerator?” she asks me.

         “Not really new anymore, but, yeah, not the same as when you lived here.”

         “Does your father still have the bar downstairs?”

         “Refrigerators and ovens may change, Emmie, but I can promise you my father’s basement bar will never.”

         We were lucky. Other kids had to worry about stealing beer because their parents could see the bottles or cans go missing. Not us. We could pretty much take as much as we wanted. Our father had a small bar stocked with cheap booze, and where there was always a chilled keg of Genesee Cream Ale on tap. So even if our old man suspected the beer was going faster than expected, he wasn’t going to say anything—we’d deny it, and my mother would chastise him for drinking too much. We spent a lot of our senior year in high school drinking my father’s beer.

         “Should we go steal some of his beer for old time’s sake?” she asks me.

         Emmie rotates her glass of beer on the thick, clear, polyurethane surface of the bar. We’re both looking at it. And, I wonder if we’re thinking the same thing: that the way the condensation pools at its base, it appears as if the glass itself is melting. Only that’s not really what I’m thinking. What I’m really thinking is that I can’t believe Emmie is sitting right here next to me, back in the basement of my parents’ house. And I can’t stop thinking about the last time we were down here, drinking beer.

It was Emmie’s last night before she was to go back to France. It had started with the four of us—Missy, Jen, Emmie, and me. Missy and I did what we always do—gotten into a fight. Missy had wanted to just go out the two of us, but I insisted we hang with Jen and Emmie. Missy spent most of the night acting put-out, so I told her, fine, let’s just go back to her place since she was making such an effort to be rude. Missy took issue with me calling her rude, and accused me of wanting to hang out with Emmie instead of her. I said, well what the hell, it’s her last night—so what’s so wrong about wanting to hang out with her before she goes back to her home country? Missy responded to that by storming out. Jen, who drank too much and got sick, was next to leave.

And just like that, it was the two of us. It had been the first time in an entire year the two of us were together without anyone else around. Sure, my sister could think of her like a sister, and even my parents could even think of her like a daughter. But it was different for me.

Emmie was beautiful, and charming, and we were teenagers. If we spent time just the two of us, nothing could have come of it. Either we would have ended up dating, which would have been entirely inappropriate given the fact that we were her host family, or the more likely outcome would have been that the feelings were entirely one-sided, and she would have rejected me, which would have been painful for me, awkward for her, and still entirely inappropriate considering the circumstances. So, my relationship with her was strictly platonic, and more friend-of-friend than anything.

         “Paul, I have a question,” Emmie says without looking up.

         “Okay,” I say, and I feel a surge of adrenaline, as if my body is telling me to just run away as fast as I can, to escape, like I’m in some kind of danger. Instead, I rub my thumb against that flattened edge that should be the rounded tip of my finger.

         “My last night here, before I went back to France. I asked you if there was something you wanted to do. You said you wanted to cook for me.”

         “I was hoping you’d forgotten about that.”

         She laughs a little, but it’s a sad laugh. “How could I?”

         “I thought maybe there was an outside chance you’d drank so much that you blacked out.”

         “Sorry to disappoint,” she smiles at me. Then her smiles fades and she looks at me, seriously, maybe even a little sadly. “Is that really what you wanted to do? Cook?”

         “What do you want me to say, Emmie?” I ask her, rubbing my forehead.

         She reaches out and rubs my forearm. “Oh, no, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable,” she says with real concern. “Forget it, it’s all right, forget it.”

         But we’re back in this basement; we’re back where we were that night, the night that I think of more than any other night of my entire life, more than my own wedding, which I barely even remember—the night I’ve spent decades wishing I could go back to and do it all over again.

“Well, no and yes,” I tell her. “If you want the truth, no and yes. Yes, I wanted to cook for you. Because I wanted to impress you. No, because what I really wanted to do was what I was hoping to do after I impressed you.”

         “And what was that? What were you hoping to do?”

         “I think you know what I was hoping to do,” I tell her.

         “You were hoping to kiss me,” Emmie says.

         I nod. “Yeah,” I let out a helpless little laugh, “I was hoping to kiss you.”

I should have just gone for it, of course. Instead, I’d gotten in my mind that I should make her a midnight snack—a fresh, flavorful bruschetta. I sliced the baguette, and then I diced up the Roma tomatoes and put them in a bowl along with just a clove of diced garlic. I’d tossed that with olive oil and salt and pepper. And then for the final touch, fresh basil.

         I carefully selected what looked to be the best, biggest leaves. I rinsed them in cold water and dried them with a paper towel.

         “Watch this,” I told Emmie, as I stacked the leaves on the cutting board. Then I rolled the basil leaves, as if maybe I was rolling a cigar. “You’re gonna like this little trick I use.”

         Emmie leaned back against the counter as she watched me work.

         The light was dim in the kitchen. It seemed good for the mood, and I didn’t want my parents coming downstairs, thinking they’d forgotten to turn out the lights. I had refilled my beer before coming upstairs, and I took a nice long sip. When I looked back down at the rolled-up basil, I couldn’t help but notice I was seeing double. And, yet, I still felt sharp, like the alcohol had really only affected my vision.

         I picked up the chef’s knife and, in an effort to show Emmie just how nimble with this tool I was, I rapidly began slicing the basil in thin ribbons. It was perfect, how the blade of the knife rocked on the plastic surface of the cutting board, how the basil unfurled into those thin green strips. How deft my hands must have appeared, how smooth and effortless I must have looked to her, I thought. But this thought was interrupted by a sudden jolt at the tip of my pointer finger on my left hand. It didn’t hurt. Not at first. But it stopped me from slicing.

         “You OK?” Emmie said, sounding worried.

         “Huh,” I said, as I looked at my finger. There appeared to be a distinct line drawn right through the tip of it. Just a line. Nothing else. And then all at once, this line was overrunning with dark blood.

         “Oh, fuck,” I said as a throbbing, thrumming pain set in. I grabbed the paper towels with which I’d dried the basil, and pressed it against my badly bleeding finger. The paper towel was fully drenched in blood within moments.

         Emmie gasped. “Paul!”

         “It’s OK,” I told her, but blood was streaming from my finger, and it was forming a rapidly growing pool on the surface of the cutting board, the ribbons of basil floating there like some kind of grim garnish. “Ah fuck, I just—” I started to say, but I wasn’t sure what it was I trying to communicate and anyway, it didn’t matter, because Emmie was no longer there. She’d run upstairs to get my parents, who then rushed me to the emergency room at the hospital in which, eighteen years prior, I’d been born.

         “We were way too drunk,” Emmie says.

         I nod. “Well, I was. That’s for sure.”

         “You know that it was sweet?” she asks me.

         “Sweet? Yeah,” I say. “Sweet, and also totally fucking humiliating.”

         Emmie looks sad. “Do you love Missy?”

         I shrug. “Yeah. Of course, I love her.”

         “Are you in love with her?”

         I shrug again. “We can’t stand each other, if you want to know the truth.”

         “I don’t understand. You couldn’t stand each other in high school, either.”

         “You’re not wrong,” I tell her. And then I sigh. “I lied earlier.”

         “About what?”

         “About Missy saying hi or whatever. That whole thing. Truth is—and I haven’t told my family this yet, because I thought I’d tell them in-person when all of us were together.”

         Emmie holds her hand in front of her mouth. “Really?” she whispers.

         “Yeah, but don’t think it’s because they’re going to be upset. Quite the opposite. They’re going to be thrilled. I really just want to see their faces when I break the news.”

         Emmie tries hard to not grin, but she can’t help it, and she breaks out into a giggle. “I’m sorry,” Emmie says. And then she composes herself and asks, “Who was the one who left?”

         “Technically me, but she made it clear years ago she didn’t love me.”

“And you still stayed with her?”

“Yeah, and I still don’t know if it’s because I was stubborn or weak. Like, on one hand, I didn’t want to admit that the entire marriage was doomed from the start. On the other hand, I couldn’t really see myself in a better situation.”

         “So then,” Emmie asks me, “what finally made you do it?”

         I can’t tell her the truth, of course. And yet, I blurt it out anyway. “I found out you were coming back.”

         She looks shocked.

         “Not because I think I’ve got a chance. And anyway, how would that work? You in Paris, me in New Jersey. It’s more like, after 25 years, I knew how I would look to you: an aspiring-chef-who-settles-for-being-a-mechanic. Older, fatter, living in the same place, in the same shitty relationship with the same woman who I didn’t get along with back then.” I drink the rest of my beer, and then wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. “I kind of looked at all that, and figured, shit, Emmie’s coming. What am I gonna do? Can’t just change that I’m a mechanic. Can’t afford to go buy a brownstone in Brooklyn like Jen. Can’t just drop twenty pounds. But I realized I could change one thing, and that I was long overdue for changing it anyway.”

         “I am glad I could help.”

         I nod. “Yeah. Thanks for that.”

         “That is, if you think this is a good thing.”

         “It is a good thing,” I say.

She smiles at me. But then her smile falls away and she looks down at the bar, maybe at my finger, maybe at nothing in particular. “Did Jen tell you I got engaged?”

         Jen hadn’t mentioned it, I tell her. And I wonder why. Maybe she knew I’d be sad. Or more likely it’s just because she’s so busy, living a wholly separate and successful life from our old hometown and the people who still remain. I look at Emmie’s hand, but I see no ring.

         “He broke it off.”

         “Fucking what?” I ask her, truly shocked.

         “He was fucking someone else,” Emmie says, and I realized I’ve never heard her use that word before. “And when I caught him, he told me it was this woman—not me—who he really loved. So, he broke it off.”

         “Jesus Christ, Emmie, I’m so sorry,” I tell her. It’s strange. I want to be glad. I want to be glad to know she’s not with anyone else. That, in theory, maybe we really can be together now. But really, I feel indignant—like I want to find this son of a bitch and fucking strangle him.

She sips her beer. Her eyes glisten a bit. “That’s why I decided to come here for Christmas,” she tells me, like she’s admitting something shameful. “I needed to get back to a place that felt happy. I can’t feel that in Paris. Not now. And there’s no one left in Sochaux except for my sister. But she’ll be with her husband’s family.”

Without so much as thinking about it, I stand up and hug her, and she lays her head against my chest and cries. I kiss the top of her head as if it’s the most natural thing in the world to do.

She looks up at me. “Thank you,” she whispers. “That feels nice.”

I kiss her forehead and embrace her more tightly before letting her go. And then I sit back down on the stool. I reach into my pocket and pull out a small plastic bag with an enamel and brass pin in it. “Here. An early Christmas gift. Too small to wrap.”

         “What is it?” she says, smiling broadly.

         “It’s a Peugeot pin. The lion. It’s old. I found a small batch online and bought it. I thought you’d get a kick out of it because, you know, Sochaux.”

         She removes it from the plastic, and she pins it on her sweater, the proud blue enamel lion outlined in gleaming golden brass. “I love it,” she says. “Thank you,” she says. “Thank you so much,” Emmie says.

         “It’s nothing,” I shrug, feeling proud of myself, which is not a feeling I’m accustomed to.

She looks at my finger. “Is it strange?”

         “Is what strange?”

         “That. Does it feel strange?”

         “It’s numb. I don't have any feeling right there. But, otherwise, no.”

         “You can barely notice anything’s missing?”

         “I can barely notice.”

         “That must be nice,” she says, and I know she’s not referring to my fingertip.

“The important thing is, it doesn’t stop me from doing anything I want to do.”

         “And what do you want to do?”

         I can’t help but grin. And then I can’t help but laugh. “Cook for you.”

         Emmie laughs. “Maybe instead we can just go for another ride in your car. I want to learn more about it. It’s funny that you know a thing so well that came from my hometown.”

“I’m still learning,” I tell her. “Speaking of which, how is it that you say Mi16 in French?”

“Well, instead of sixteen we say sez. We pronounce M the same. But the I, we pronounce like E.”

“So, em…ee…sez?” I ask.

“Yes, that’s it,” Emmie says. “That’s it exactly.”