With Eloise following behind him, Evan made his way to the children's books section and rifled through the shelves. Passing all the Harry Potters and the endless Shel Silverstein books he huffed a soft, frustrated sigh.
Well, he could at least respond to Eloise while he looked, right? He chuckled in response to what she said about her mother requiring her father to speak French. "I suppose it made it easier on him, hm?" he asked with a small, lopsided smile. "My mother learned English at a very young age and she made sure that me, my brother and sisters learned it rather quickly. It's the most useful language in the world to know, after all, isn't it? Or… wasn't it…" he added the last part rather hesitantly.
He was up on the tip of his toes (on his non-mangled foot) to look on the top shelf when she asked what he used to do. "Oh," he chuckled a little bit. "I was an artist. Which, I know, sounds pretentious, but I was really an artist. I painted, sketched… I had my own small gallery in Marseille and a section in a gallery in Manhattan when we moved out this way. What about you? Did you do anything fun before this all happened?"
He paused, smiling when his eyes finally fell upon two or three of the Eloise books. He pulled Eloise in Paris from the shelf, mostly because it seemed most appropriate in this situation. "Found them," he said with a smile as he offered the book in his hand out to her, then reached for a couple of the others.