Somehow the mournful night had produced an erotic dream about the kindly vet. The vet and Aliette. And a lot of animals who were sort of human, each of them damaged to the quick and needing to be cared for by someone who knew how, i.e., not Claude Néon.

She had awoken to the realization that their relationship was over.

Now she stood in the morning sun, weeping in her discreet way.

Piaf would be buried in the garden, exactly where she’d found him.

After shrugging his permission, because it was his house and property, Claude had turned his attention back to his tennis club newsletter and finished his breakfast before going out to dig a cat-sized hole with his spade. Then he left for work, leaving her alone to say her final farewell.

Kneeling, she wrapped Piaf in newspaper and tied the bundle with a green velvet ribbon, an old one she’d had for years, that he’d always loved to kick at, and put the bundle in the bag. Yes, a garbage bag. ‘Adieu,’ Aliette whispered.

Then she slowly lifted gentle shovelfuls of garden earth and covered her old friend.

Part 1

This side, that side

1

Piaf as Marker

French side

For a while Aliette and Claude had walked to work together. Why bother trying to conceal what was never officially mentioned but universally known? A pleasant twenty-five-minute march along affluent streets with school children and professionals, then down through the park and past her old apartment, and on through the labyrinthine old quarter to the musty police building in rue des Bon Enfants. Different schedules had eroded this comfy ritual. The morning of Piaf’s burial, Aliette headed out alone and was glad not to have Claude beside her. She paused in the park to gaze at the third-floor balcony where she and Piaf had shared beer and dreams… Arriving at the Commissariat, the inspector felt the weight of too much time as she climbed three flights of stairs. In no mood for morning chitchat, she went straight to her office, where she sat at her desk, morose, staring through her north-facing window. The sky was pale blue amid vague grey swathes of cloud where it met the rising Vosges. Summer was still making desultory gasps, but it was dying, mirroring back this futile sense of another year, not enough to show. She felt as if her life were collapsing behind her. It was not Piaf the cat. It was Piaf the marker, the mute evidence of an entire part of her life. Her best years? The notion was devastating. She stood, took her coat from the hook on the door and pulled it back on.

It was testimony to the ever-tenuous core of her heart that the inspector still paid rent to Madame Camus for the third-floor apartment beside the park. ‘My pied-à-terre,’ she joked whenever the subject of this ‘needless expense’ came up — because Claude was wanting her to contribute to the payments on the house. Needless? She had tried to see the future but it would not come clear, and so she always put another envelope in Madame Camus’ mailbox at the start of each new month. Indeed, she often climbed the stairs to sit there for a spell. Because love matters and you had to care about it. You had to work at it. Wasn’t work the crux? Claude Néon was proud of his tulips, but guess who’d soon taken over responsibility for the garden in the north end? Aliette watered and dug, planted, pruned and picked. And she tried to help him learn to tend it, but Claude had been happy to watch her do it. He said it stirred something deep and central to see her kneeling with her clippers and her trowel. That was nice to hear but did nothing to ease the encroaching ache in her lower back (like her mother was prone to), nor this evolving worry in her heart. Central, Claude? You can learn a lot about a man from observing him in his garden. Or with your cat.