I had no idea, ma grande. It’s not just trouble sleeping. You are a true night owl. Ha! Maddie guffaws, raising her head from her kitchen lab book. I’m nothing but. She taps the book with her pen: Water boils four degrees Celsius lower here in Calgary than in Montréal. Did you know that? Jacques slips his rock shoes on and, with his chin, points at the display of postcards pinned on the walls and the high ceiling of his Bowness bungalow. He moves his head this way and that, like a bird on a spring: I’m surprised your mom didn’t write you about that. Maddie could not be more surprised than him. A few minutes before, her expectation of success had run high. Now, her first Calgary experiment lies in ruins on the kitchen counter. A few minutes back, the water had come to a full boil. Maddie rinsed the batch of pearl onions that had been steeping in its salt-water basin for two days (200 grams of salt dissolved in two litres of water, she had noted in her book) and dipped them into the stockpot, a few at a time so as not to lower the temperature too much.
