Read Online Sunflowers by Sheramy Bundrick - Free Book Online

about the people he’d met and the places he’d gone. How the waiter at the café in the Place du Forum was rude but tolerated his being there, how the gypsies in the camp outside town were friendly and gave him homemade blackberry wine. “Today,” he said as he tacked the last nails into the last canvas, “I thought I’d do another study of the cedar bush in the public garden.”
    “The place where we met? Again?” I teased. “Have you had any breakfast yet?”
    He shrugged. “Coffee.”
    “You can’t work on an empty stomach.”
    “I do it all the time.”
    “I’ll make some breakfast,” I said firmly, “and you’re going to eat it.”
    “If you insist,” he replied. “It’s been a long time since a woman fussed at me about breakfast!”
    It’s been a long time since I’ve had someone to make breakfast for , I thought as I sliced potatoes to fry, revived the fire in the stove, and started a fresh pot of coffee. I’d made breakfast for Papa every day after Maman had died—sometimes he hadn’t wanted it either, but at my complaints he’d given in, every time. “À table!” I called a short time later, only to hear a muffled “Une minute,” followed by a Dutch curse as something fell heavily to the studio floor. Two minutes passed. Five. “Breakfast, Vincent,” I called again. “ Viens , it’s hot!”
    He strolled in then, wiping his hands on his trousers before I pointed to the sink. “I could get used to this,” he said. “Hot coffee, hot food…warm bed.” He winked as he reached for the coffeepot, and I passed him a plate with potatoes and toasted bread.
    “You’ll work much better now,” I told him, and he nodded, mouth too full to answer. He ate in a hurry, not talking anymore but gazing around the kitchen, into the ashes of the fireplace, out the window at the carriages rattling down the Avenue de Montmajour. After he finished, I stood to get him more potatoes, but he shook his head. I thought he was anxious to go painting, until he looked grave and started drawing on the table with his fork. “Rachel, there’s something I’d like to talk to you about.”
    I sat back down, my heart stirring in my chest. “Yes?”
    “That night when I asked you about your past, you asked me something too. You asked why I wasn’t married. The truth is, I almost was.” He saw me glance at his left hand, resting on the table where I couldn’t see the scar. “Not her. Someone I met later in The Hague, a prostitute named Sien.”
    “A prostitute?” I said numbly. “From a brothel?”
    “From the streets.”
    His story didn’t spill from him the way mine had from me. It came slowly, phrase after careful phrase, and he kept his eyes lowered to his plate. He met Sien one lonely night in a darkened alley, where she looked for men and money to add to the pittance she earned from doing laundry. She was pregnant, he said, discarded like an old rag by some man who’d promised her a better life, and she already had a little daughter. Vincent wanted to help her, so he paid her to model for his drawings, and soon he invited them to live with him and share his bread. He kept her a secret as long as he could, because he knew what his family would say: that she wasn’t beautiful, wasn’t refined, that she was using him. She could barely read and write; she smoked cigars, drank gin, and cursed like a sailor. A hard life had marked her figure and bearing, smallpox scars her face. She was many steps down the social ladder as far as his family was concerned, no worthy match for a van Gogh.
    “Did you love her?” I dared to ask.
    “Very much, and I wanted to marry her.”
    “Why didn’t you?”
    “ He wouldn’t have let me,” Vincent replied, and I knew he meant his father. “Eventually I told Theo about Sien because I needed his help. He didn’t approve any more than my parents would, but he helped me anyway because he’s a good man and a good brother. Sien gave birth to a healthy baby boy,