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the quarter, then through the Jardin du Luxembourg, her eyes filling with the showy colors and delicate textures of midsummer petunias, begonias, and roses. Among those planted beauties, she found the flower merchant she was looking for, a toothless woman named Louise who’d lost both sons in the war, whom Adrienne had introduced Sylvia to years before, instructing her to buy flowers only from her. Her cart near the palace was small, but she always carried the finest, longest-lasting blooms. Eleanor’s favorite were pink peonies, which were copious in late spring, not midsummer, but miraculously Louise had a single bouquet of them that evening. “They grew slowly, in the shade,” she explained, when Sylvia marveled at their presence. Then she hailed a cab, one of her mother’s favorite luxuries, and enjoyed the little tour of Paris she got from the open window: past the Sorbonne and then over the Seine on the Pont de Sully with Notre-Dame Cathedral just to her left, then northeast and circling the Place de la Bastille, all the way into the twentieth arrondissement, where Père Lachaise Cemetery sprawled leafy and green, with arcades of trees shading countless gray tombstones, temples, and memorials. The light had turned silver by the time she got out of the car and passed through the break in the high stone walls that encircled the cemetery. The place was something of a maze, and even though she’d been there for the burial just a few weeks before, Sylvia feared she might not be able to locate her mother’s small grave. Fortunately, though, she found it with no trouble. I’m never lost in Paris. Thanks to you, Mother. She set the peonies down on the earth before the stone with her mother’s name and dates of birth and death, then felt a breeze ruffle her hair and cool her neck. Breathing as deeply as she could, she wondered why, precisely, she’d come. To deliver the flowers, of course. What she wanted, desperately,
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