‘You’re coming?’ Clara was surprised though delighted. ‘Hazel too?’
‘No, Hazel’s refused. Sophie gets home tomorrow morning and Hazel says she has to cook and clean, mais, franchement?’ Madeleine leaned in conspiratorially, ‘I think she’s afraid of ghosts. Monsieur Béliveau has agreed to come.’
‘We must be grateful Hazel has decided to cook instead,’ said Monsieur Béliveau. ‘She’s made us a wonderful casserole.’
It was very like Hazel, Clara thought. Always caring for others. Clara was slightly afraid people took advantage of Hazel’s generosity, especially that daughter of hers, but she also realized it was none of her business.
‘But we have a great deal of work to do before dinner, mon ami.’ Madeleine smiled radiantly at Monsieur Béliveau and touched him lightly on the shoulder. The older man smiled. He hadn’t smiled a lot since his wife died, but now he did, and Clara had another reason to like Madeleine. She watched them now holding their baskets of Easter eggs and walking through the late April sunshine, the youngest and tenderest of lights falling on a young and tender relationship. Monsieur Béliveau, tall and slim and slightly stooped, seemed to have a spring in his step.
Clara stood up and stretched her forty-eight-year-old body, then glanced around. It looked like a field of derrières. Every villager was bending over, placing eggs. Clara wished she had her sketch pad.
There was certainly nothing cool about Three Pines, nothing funky or edgy or any of the other things that had mattered to Clara when she’d graduated from art college twenty-five years ago. Nothing here was designed. Instead, the village seemed to follow the lead of the three pines on the green and simply to have grown from the earth over time.
Clara took a deep breath of the fragrant spring air and looked over at the home she shared with Peter. It was brick with a wooden porch and a fieldstone wall fronting the Commons. A path wound from their gate through some apple trees about to bloom to their front door. From there Clara’s eyes wandered around the houses surrounding the Commons. Like their inhabitants, the homes of Three Pines were sturdy and shaped by their environment. They’d withstood storms and wars, loss and sorrow. And emerging from that was a community of great kindness and compassion.
Clara loved it. The houses, the shops, the village green, the perennial gardens and even the washboard roads. She loved the fact that Montreal was less than a two-hour drive away, and the American border was just down the road. But more than all of that, she loved the people who now spent this and every Good Friday hiding wooden eggs for children.