Girl in the Afternoon by Serena Burdick

could have a whole spoonful of currant jelly.”
    Jacques pulled his thumb from his mouth. “Two.”
    â€œVery well, two spoonfuls.”
    â€œThree.”
    â€œNo, two. Now go.” Aimée planted a kiss on his forehead and turned him toward the stairs. “Hold the rail,” she called, and his small hand shot out and slid along the shiny banister.
    Safely behind the closed studio door, Aimée helped Leonie out of her wet coat and hung it on a hook next to her smock.
    Leonie whispered, “I’ve found him,” smiling triumphantly.
    A cool sensation ran along the ridge of Aimée’s collarbone. “Where?”
    â€œI went to Café Guerbois, and Café de la Nouvelle Athènes, just to be sure, but you were right, no one knew him.”
    Aimée studied the painting she was working on of a young girl swinging open a garden gate. Until now, Henri had remained her ghost, undisturbed beside her. She wasn’t sure she was ready for him to be real again.
    Leonie began unlacing her boots. “I was hoping,” she said, “at the very least, someone might have heard of him and would know where to direct me, but no one had. I met a writer—grim, serious fellow—who suggested a few places.” She pulled her boots off and peeled her wet stockings over her feet. “I went to all of them, but there was no Henri Savaray to be found.” She stood up and laid the stockings on the back of her chair.
    Aimée picked up a palette knife and began scraping off the girl’s hands.
    â€œI went all over the city. Places I’d never been before, and then, wouldn’t you know it, last night I stopped in a café right off the Place de Clichy, just to get something to eat, and I asked this girl if she’d heard of him—lovely red-haired thing drinking all by herself—‘I have,’ she says in one of those husky, untrustworthy sort of voices. ‘He owe you money too?’ she says.” Leonie stood next to Aimée, watching her scrape away all her hard work.
    Aimée moved from the hands to the girl’s head, wishing she was alone in her bedroom. She would have liked to bury her head in her arms and weep.
    â€œShe told me he dined there nightly,” Leonie went on, excited. “I stayed just to get a look at him. I had no intention of speaking with him, but when he walked through the door that girl went right up to him, demanded her money, and then pointed to me and said, ‘She wants her money too.’”
    Aimée put down her knife and studied the mutilated girl, her head gone, her hands cut off at the wrists.
    Leonie had expected excitement, delight, or at the very least, gratitude from Aimée. A look of shock would have sufficed, tears, something. But Aimée just backed away from her canvas and sat down, her expression maddeningly unaffected.
    â€œCan you believe all this time and he was right there?” Leonie raised her voice as if speaking to her grand-tante . “I must have walked by that café a hundred times.”
    â€œYou spoke to him?” Aimée asked.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWhat did he say?”
    â€œNothing at first. He just looked at me, bemused, and then told the girl he’d have her money next week, which was not what she wanted to hear. She practically took the door off its hinges on her way out.”
    Leonie noticed the color had drained from Aimée’s face. There was something unsettling in her expression. “Your brother’s nice enough,” she said as if his niceness was what was at stake. “He came over directly and said he was sorry he’d forgotten such a lovely face.” Leonie smiled. “I told him he didn’t owe me a sous, that that girl had confused me for someone else. He offered to buy me a drink, said it was the least he could do.”
    â€œDid he?” Aimée tried to picture the Henri she remembered drinking spirits with