My Grape Baby

Books byLaura Bradbury ROMANCE Oxford Series Oxford Wild Oxford Star Transplant Romance Unlikely Match The Winemakers Trilogy A Vineyard for Two Love in the Vineyards Return to the Vineyards MEMOIRS Grape Series My Grape Year My Grape Québec My Grape Christmas My Grape Paris My Grape Wedding My Grape Escape My Grape Village My Grape Cellar My Grape Baby Laura Bradbury and Rebecca Wellman Bisous & Brioche Published by Grape Books Copyright © 2023 Laura Bradbury Kindle Edition All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For more information contact Grape Books, 1183 Oliver Street, Victoria BC, V8S 4X1, Canada. Paperback ISBN: 978-1-989784-35-8 eBook ISBN: 978-1-989784-34-1 Visit: www.laurabradbury.com To my Grape Baby, Clémentine. Also, for our beloved Mémé, and my forever amie de coeur Marie (aka Charlotte) contents Books by Laura Bradbury Half-Title Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Epigraph Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Chapter Twenty-Seven Chapter Twenty-Eight Chapter Twenty-Nine Chapter Thirty The Grapevine Merci About Laura Find Laura Online Books by Laura Bradbury “On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.” – Le Petit Prince, Saint-Exupéry chapter one JUNE 30TH It was way too scorching to be pregnant, so thank God the pregnancy test I’d taken the day before had been negative. I’d been disappointed at the time, but now it dawned on me that being en cloque, as the French called it, during a sweltering Burgundian summer would be miserable. The English meaning of cloque actually meant “blistered” in English, so pregnant woman were “blistering” which was a way too graphic metaphor to visualize for too long. However, being pregnant on a day like today—when the air blew straight from Hades and the sun became a medieval torture device—did do that saying justice. I held Charlotte’s and Camille’s hands as we waited to cross the battle zone of the Saint-Coeur parking lot. Their palms were sticky with sweat in mine, and a slight film of dirt from the parched vineyards surrounding Beaune stuck to our skin. Heat waves in Burgundy were unpredictable, with one glaring exception. Every single year a heat wave arrived just in time for the Saint-Coeur “Kermesse”—the day when us parents were expected to stay outside for hours and watch our children, our petits chéris, perform a needlessly long and intricately choreographed performance including dancing, costumes, and even (kill me now) mime, to celebrate the end of the school year. Parents and children alike had all been working hard. For an entire school year, Charlotte and Camille had been perfecting their cursive writing, learning their rosary, and eating properly with utensils at lunch. Franck and I had successfully navigated the nuns that ran the school (still off-putting as far as I was concerned), helping with homework, and braving the war zone of the school parking lot. The parking lot situation was the most stressful piece by a long shot. I’d seen nothing equivalent to it back in Canada, where I was from. In France, there were no orderly pick up or drop off lines. Instead, anarchy reigned supreme. Yelling and rude French hand gestures were everyday occurrences. On one fine day, I’d witnessed a fellow parent take a tire iron out of his trunk in a fit of gallic rage and smash the windshield of another parent who had cut him off. Our “reward” for all that was a day that should be sweet and fun, but the temperature of 42 degrees Celsius turned it into a survival steeplechase. I saw a window between cars to cross over to the school entrance. “On y va!” I pulled them across. The big wooden doors of the walled Catholic school were open today and parents were already streaming in, dragging overheated children behind them. Like my girls, most of them were partly or completely dressed up in their performance costumes already. Camille was going to be a mouse for her class performance, so she was wearing billowy black silk pants, a white T-shirt, and a pink satin vest. We just needed to pick up her ears and create a black nose and whiskers with eyeliner once we got to her classroom. Charlotte’s dance combined the two Grade One (or “Première”) classes, which meant there would be roughly fifty seven-year-olds on stage during her performance. They had been rehearsing some sort of Charlie-Chaplin-esque mime dance that involved a lot of passing around little black bowler hats that we had been instructed to pick up in her classroom. Right now she was dressed in black leggings and a white T-shirt, so we just needed the hat and for me to draw a curly mustache on her. I tried to imagine fifty, four-foot-tall mimes running around. Definitely nightmare fuel. “Maman, I’m soooo hot,” Camille said, her palm slippery in mine. “I know sweetie. We’re all melting today.” We passed the Virgin Mary statue inside the school grounds, which my girls had grown quite attached to and had decided possessed mystical powers. This being an unabashedly Catholic school, they were encouraged rather than discouraged to expand on this set of beliefs. “Bonjour Marie,” Charlotte said and touched the statue’s marble-white big toe, paying homage. “Bonjour Marie,” Camille parroted. “Maman, you didn’t say bonjour to Marie.” Charlotte frowned at me. “I’m not Catholic, remember?” Franck, my Burgundian husband, had been brought up Catholic, like most French people of his generation. In contrast, my family believed all organized religions were inherently corrupt. In my upbringing, communing with a higher power didn’t require a church, priests, nuns, or rosaries. It