The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted (24 page)

The baker kept glancing at Julien as if asking if I really
had permission, if I was sane. Julien kept nodding,
Yes, yes, do as she says
.

I felt absurd driving home. With the backseat filled with bags from the Monoprix, I had to stack the boxes of pastries on my lap. They were so high, they blocked my vision. I wedged loaves of bread between the door and the passenger’s seat. “It’s part of our French education,” I said.

“No need for a rationale,” Julien said. “But that was …”

“What?” I said. “It’s just my contribution.”

“Exactly,” he said. “I understand. But that was …”

“Joyful,” I said. “It was very joyful. I’m working on joy, right? That’s what people are supposed to do, according to you, when they’re miserable.”

“It was …”

“What?” I said. “What was it?”

“Erotic.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Don’t be so French about it,” I said, smiling a little.

“I’m not being French. That was the international language. It was erotic.”

I sighed. “I was overcome.”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s what it was. It’s a start.”

“A start of what? Am I living a little?”

“Yes,” he said, “just a little, but a start.”

ulien helped me unload all of the bags from the Monoprix into my house, but we carried the patisserie boxes
and loaves of French bread to the Dumonteils’ house. Through the open windows, I heard a strange, atonal moan, one sad note and then another. Music? Some awful, sad goose?

We found Charlotte, Abbot, and Véronique in the kitchen, all working with rapt intensity. Véronique was sitting on a stool pulled to the counter, checking on something in a Dutch oven.

Charlotte looked up from a chopping block, teary-eyed. Was she the one who’d been moaning? A nervous alarm shot through me. Had something awful happened? Had someone called with bad news?

But then she said with a smile, “I’ve never cut an onion before.”

“How is that possible?” I asked.

“No one I know cooks real food,” she said.

“It’s a chemical reaction,” Abbot said. “The onions have tiny cells and you break them open.” This sounded like something Henry would have taught him. Henry was a cook who talked about the chemistry of food. How did Abbot hold these things in his head still?

Abbot was sitting in front of a row of wineglasses filled with various levels of water. He dipped his finger into one of the glasses and rubbed its delicate lip. That was the noise I’d mistaken for moaning. It
was
music. “I already dissected a sardine,” he said. The intensity in the room was studious, not sorrowful. Was I not able to make these kinds of distinctions anymore?

“See,” I said to Julien, shaking off my alarm, “their French educations have begun.”

“They are brilliant children,” Véronique said. Although she seemed completely relaxed and serene, it was clear that she’d orchestrated the children into this state of wonder and curiosity.

We set the boxes down on the kitchen table.

Véronique turned and gasped. “What is this?”

“I had a kind of attack in the patisserie,” I said.

“Open them!” Abbot cried.

And so we did—popping open lids, revealing the bright confections, swirls, glazes.

“Why so much? We will keep these for dessert,” Véronique said, shutting the boxes—perhaps uncomfortable with the abundance.

“What did the police say?” Abbot asked. “Will they find everything for us?”

“Probably not,” I said.

He looked down at the row of glasses in front of him.

“I promised a cathedral and warthogs this afternoon!” Julien said.

“But first!” Véronique said, and I thought for a moment of Hercule Poirot from the movies made of old Agatha Christie novels that I loved as a child. I was expecting her to say,
I would like to tell all of you why I have asked you here today
, and then to go on to discuss our various ties to a murder. “Before going, I want to walk the land with Heidi,” she said, a silent
h
, which made my name sound like
ID
—as if walking the land required us to take proper identification. I was a little afraid of Véronique and in awe of her, too. She seemed like
a powerful force, running this bed-and-breakfast on her own, having been divorced for so long. She kept an eye on me, as if she were trying to see inside of me. I wondered what she was looking for. “It will take a moment to prepare,” she said.

“I was going to do some unpacking in the house,” I said. “Why don’t you come over when you’re ready?”

“Okay,” she said.

“And then we’ll go see cathedrals and warthogs,” I said. “I don’t want to miss them.”

Charlotte and Abbot began helping Julien prepare sack lunches that we would eat on our outing, and I went back to our house to put away the things from the Monoprix and to organize.

During the short walk between the two houses, the mountain surprised me again. It appeared so suddenly and was so massive that it could stop me in my tracks. The fact that this was what a backyard could look out onto still seemed unnatural—not to mention the dig, archaeologists in the distance arguing next to the pattern they’d cut into the earth.

I walked into the house, and it was strange to be there alone, the quiet settling around me. I moved quickly, divvying our new clothes into piles, putting food into the cupboards, the mini fridge. If, thousands of years from now, the house was dug up, our things unearthed, it would be quite a stack, I decided. How would these things define us? What would it mean—our wrappers, our plastic, rubbery toothbrushes, our chunky adapters? I thought of the archaeologists, what it’s like to unearth the past, to dust it off and try to
re-create some semblance of what lives had once been lived. It wasn’t really possible. If they dug this up, they would find no trace of Henry. Yet, Henry still had the greatest presence of all.

I dug to the bottom of one bag and found the charger. Charlotte’s phone was where she’d left it, on the kitchen table. I plugged it in with the adapter. It gave a hearty beep and blinked to life. There were now fifty-seven missed calls.

Adam Briskowitz, I thought to myself. Poor kid. Was he pining away? I imagined John Cusack in
Say Anything
, the boom box raised over his head—that failed serenade.

I went upstairs to my room and changed into a skirt and a T-shirt, some of the casual clothes bought at the Monoprix, and flip-flops.

As I walked back down the steep, narrow stone steps, I heard the buzz of Charlotte’s phone as it rattled against the kitchen table.

I picked up the phone. The caller ID read B
RISKY
.

I sighed. “Brisky,” I said to myself, and flipped open the phone. “Hello?”

“Hello?” he said, astonished. “Hello? Charlotte? Hello?”

“It’s Charlotte’s aunt,” I said. “Heidi.”

“Is Charlotte there? Can I talk to her? This is urgent. I’ve been trying to reach her, and it’s really very urgent.”

“She isn’t here right now,” I said.

“Where is she?”

“She’s here with me, in France.”

“She flew to France?”

“Yes,” I said. “I don’t think she wants to talk to you, but I can take a message since I don’t think she’s listening to the ones you leave.”

“It was really irresponsible of her to fly to France,” Adam said, more to himself than to me.

“Irresponsible?”

“Yes,” he said. “She really shouldn’t have done that. At least, I don’t think she should have. Do you?”

“Is that the message you’d like me to give her?” I asked. “That she’s irresponsible because she’s traveling this summer?”

“No,” he said, the edge of his voice softening. “No, please. Please tell her that I love her. And that I didn’t mean for her to get Briskowitzed.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m not familiar with that term, but I’ll tell her.”

“And I know she doesn’t want to see me,” he said, “but maybe I could write her a letter? An old-fashioned letter?”

“That might be better,” I said. “We haven’t yet gotten online here.”

“What’s the address?” I could hear him scrambling for pen and paper.

I walked over to the fridge, and I read the address that was posted there.

He repeated it back to me and I confirmed.

“Great,” he said. “Thank you so much. You can forget my message. Don’t even tell her I called. I’ll send a letter out today, explaining everything. So, we have a deal?”

“We do.”

“Yes, yes, okay, thank you so much. Excellent,” he said. “I’ll never forget this. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” I said. “Bye.”

“Au revoir!”
he said then, in a lousy accent.
“Merci and au revoir!”

ézanne regarded Mont Sainte-Victoire from the front. We see the mountain from the side.
La longueur
. A wider canvas,” Véronique said. We had walked out of the back door of her house, past the gravel driveway, toward the vineyards and the archaeological dig, now abandoned in the heat of the day. She had a cane with her, a cane with a marble handle. She didn’t use it to walk as much as to point things out. It was such a natural accessory I wondered how she’d ever done without it. “The mountain changes color through the day, if you have patience. Your mother watched this mountain for a long time that final summer she visited us.”

I wasn’t sure how to take this bit of information. I had the impression that Véronique wanted me to ask a question but I wasn’t sure what it should be. I only remembered our lives without her—my father in the kitchen, fumbling with the can opener.
I guess you should be prepared to make a decision between the two of us. Who knows how this cookie will crumble?
The cookie didn’t crumble. She came home. I tried not to dwell on what her lost summer meant to her or to me. It was lost.
She was found and returned to us. But now that I was here, I couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to her. What had she learned that allowed her to come back?

“The mountain’s beautiful,” I said simply.

She paused, waiting for something more. “Yes,” she said. “It is.” She pointed to a tree some distance between our two houses. “That is where your land commences. The line goes all the way to that tree, more or less.” This divided our properties as if the driveway between the two continued as a boundary. “That is yours. We will walk the perimeter.”

“But your foot,” I said.

“I have to keep moving. The circulation,” she said, “it moves and it is good for the bones.” We walked for a bit. “Your mother is a very strong woman,” she said.

“I think she had a lot on her mind the last time she was here. I guess she had to decide whether or not to come home, if we were worth it or if she should chuck it all for life in Provence.” I meant this as a joke, kind of, but the lightness didn’t translate.

“Her children were always
worth it
. The question was her husband,” she said. “He was—a cheat? That’s what you call them?”

I nodded, uncomfortable with my father being called a cheat, even though he had been one. He was still my father, and after all of these years devoted to salvaging their marriage, I’d restored him to some higher position.

“My ex-husband was an imperialist. He was a cheat. He left. When your mother was here that summer with her marriage
breaking, my marriage was breaking, too.” I hadn’t known this. It was something more that my mother and Véronique shared.

“Where is your husband now?”

“He is dead. He left us during a winter. Not a word. He took another family and lived in Arles. The boys did not have a father, not in reality.” She sighed. “And I prefer this. Without a man.”

“See, it’s possible to be a woman on her own terms and to be happy,” I said. “I can appreciate that.”

She stopped and dug her cane into the dirt. “No,” she said. “I closed the doors of my heart and they were locked. Your mother could not do this. She has a heart with open doors. She has left the doors open. One woman closes and locks her heart. Another leaves the doors open. Who is strong? Who is weak? Maybe both are only stubborn?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“When she was here, my marriage ended. We lived together, but I knew that he would leave one day. After he was gone, I had lovers but did not fall in love. I closed the doors because of fear. That is not a good life. But I made my rules and now I’m content.”