“Paracanoe.” He places a black coffee in front of me. “Do you want milk?”
“She’s a Paralympian?”
“Milk?” he asks again, a silver jug in his hand.
“Yes, please.”
I watch him pour, wondering not only why he hasn’t responded, but why he looks so tense.
I remember our conversation last night about my shitty Frenchand his vastly improved English and for some reason it occurs to me to ask, “Isshethe one who helped with your English?”
A weariness seems to settle over him as he nods. “She was my girlfriend.”
And just like that, I have a dozen more questions.
He saves me from asking the ones that are vying the hardest to get out.
“She had ALS,” he says.
I’m floored. It’s the same type of motor neuron disease as his mother—and his use of the wordhadmeans…
He’s lost her.
“Oh shit,” I breathe. That must have been unfathomably hard. “I’m so sorry. When?”
“When did she pass away or when did she win that?” He nods at the medal.
“Both?” I reply weakly.
“She won that two years ago.” He swallows. “And she died just under a year later.”
He sounds proud, and yet so sad.
“Life is so unfair,” I murmur.
How much bad luck can one person have, to lose both his mother and his girlfriend to the same rare disease?
The waitress interrupts again to speak to Étienne.
“The last customers have requested their bill,” he says to me when she leaves us to it. “They don’t want coffee so drink up and we’ll go.”
“How often doyou help Lise out?” I ask as we wander over the pedestrian bridge by the restaurant, my head still spinning from his revelation of a few minutes ago.
“Not often,” he replies. “She’s short-staffed at the moment, but she’ll hire someone new before long.”
I still have so many questions, but I very much doubt he wants to put himself through reliving his trauma to satisfy my curiosity.
“How did the party cleanup go?” I ask.
“It hasn’t happened yet. I’ve got friends coming over at six.”
“That’s nice of them.”
“We’re brothers. We help each other out.”
The river level is so low that most of the smooth pale rock bed is exposed.
“You couldn’t kayak through this part of town,” I note.
