The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted (31 page)

“You can’t do this without them.” I wondered if they really would flip. It was hard to say.

“I think I can,” she said.

“You don’t know how hard it is. And you can’t ever really know what the sacrifices will be. It was hard enough for me when Henry was by my side and we were ready. You just can’t imagine how hard it’s going to be on you and Adam.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” She flopped onto the bed. “This is why I didn’t tell anyone.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t want to push her. “We don’t have to have all the answers right now.”

I stood up and walked to the window. Julien and Abbot were sitting on the back step of the Dumonteils’ house, the box at their feet. Maybe they were feeding the bird or helping to make it a nest for the night or planning where to keep it so no feral cats could get to it. And, looking down at Abbot, there was this feeling I couldn’t deny. Charlotte was pregnant, and there was a stirring of joy. I couldn’t help it. “A baby!” I whispered.

“I know,” Charlotte said. “That’s the intense part. I’m pregnant with
a baby.
”

“Is this what you were praying about in Notre-Dame and Saint Maximin?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know anything about praying. All three of my parents are agnostics,” she said. “I just kneel down and say the same thing over and over.”

“And what was that?”

“I kind of pretend that I’m one of the Flying Wallendas.”

“The circus performers?”

“I don’t know why, except I read about them when I was a kid, and they made an impression. They did these pyramids up on high wires.”

“And so what do you pray for while pretending to be a Flying Wallenda?”

“I’m the kind of Flying Wallenda who prays for a good net. That’s it,” she said. “Just a good net.”

hat night, we all ate dinner together, sharing the dining room with a British family with two children who wanted fried potatoes, and three older Australian women who cornered Véronique about where they could find the best Mediterranean beaches.

Julien was there, too. He helped his mother serve and took the two British children out into the yard to look at the fireflies so that their parents could eat in peace. When I looked out the wide windows, I saw the two children running in the grass barefoot, but Julien was watching me. And who was I now? A woman surrounded by a pregnant sixteen-year-old and her strange young boyfriend with his wild head of hair and my eight-year-old son who had to be talked out of bringing the bird in its box into the dining room with him? Everything seemed to have shifted. The fact was that
Charlotte was pregnant the day before, when I’d been thinking that this was the way it was and the way it was going to be. But now all of that was gone. This was new terrain. We were all interconnected now, locked together by this secret. It wouldn’t last, of course. Charlotte would have to tell her parents—Briskowitz too—but for now, I wondered if Julien was thinking what I was thinking:
What a strange family
.

Charlotte described the meal: eggplants stuffed with a mix of prosciutto, anchovies, salt pork, and mushrooms, seasoned with garlic, onion, salt, and pepper, topped with breadcrumbs, butter, and lemon.

“You helped make this?” Adam asked Charlotte. “I thought you considered stirring fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt cooking.”

“That was then and this is now! I know the difference between pressed and chopped garlic. I prefer pressed.”

“Huh,” Adam said.

“She can cook like crazy,” Abbot said.

We were quiet for a while.

“This is a nice place,” Adam said. He was wearing a Velvet Underground T-shirt now and had his suit jacket back on.

“Heidi used to come here as a kid,” Charlotte said.

“I was a bad little kid,” Adam said. “My parents didn’t believe in discipline. I once hit my brother during the movie
Gandhi.
”

“Huh,” I said.

“I learned that nonviolence is hard, which is one of the lessons of the film. But, in general, because my parents were softies, I’ve had to learn things the hard way.”

“And what way is that?” I asked.

“I got beat up a couple of times for being snotty,” he said. “And I went to a do-good liberal school that made us interact with and serve the poor. That stuff is pretty artificial, but it does sink in.”

Charlotte couldn’t even look at him. He’d come all this way. I felt sorry for him, but I wasn’t so sure that I should. Charlotte would have good reason to be cold.

Abbot was the one to bring up the pregnancy. I’d told him before we came in that Charlotte was indeed pregnant. That she was too young, really, and that would make it hard on her. But we can be happy for her. That was about all I had time to cover.

Now Abbot said, “I know that just because you’re pregnant doesn’t mean you’re married. Like Jill and Marcy.” This was a lesbian couple, friends of ours, one of whom had twins through in vitro.

“Actually, Jill and Marcy are pretty much married,” I said. “They’ve been together for ten years or more.”

“Oh,” Abbot said. “Are you a lesbian?” he asked Charlotte.

“Nope,” she said. “Unfortunately, that’s not my calling.”

“Oh, so you’d prefer to be a lesbian right now?” Adam said. “Very nice.”

“I was just saying that if I were a lesbian, I wouldn’t be in this situation.”

Adam looked at Abbot. “I’m going to ask Charlotte to marry me.”

“And Charlotte is going to say no,” Charlotte said.

“See?” he said to me. “I told you she was going to say no.”

“I’m going to say no because it’s a bad idea. What are you, from the 1950s all of a sudden?” she said.

“I’m trying to do the right thing,” he said. “And last I checked, getting married was the right thing.”

“Last I checked, you thought that marriage was the institutionalization of patriarchal dominance. You thought that marriage was just condescending tax code.”

“I was probably high,” he said, and then he looked at Abbot and then said to me, “No offense. I don’t smoke weed anymore.”

“None taken,” I said.

“It’s seriously been, like, two months.”

“Okay,” I said, not sure that this was really cause for celebration.

“Why aren’t you going to say yes to getting married?” Abbot asked Charlotte.

“I’m not getting married, because it just doesn’t apply to sixteen-year-olds, Absterizer. Parental units or not,” Charlotte said.

“Gotcha,” Adam said. “And so this has nothing to do with the fact that you don’t
love
me enough?”

“You want to get married because I’m pregnant. What’s that got to do with loving
me
enough?”

This was said a little loudly, garnering the attention of the British and the Australians alike.

“Do your parents know?” I asked Adam quietly.

“Not exactly,” he said.

“What’s that mean?” Charlotte asked.

“They know I’m here,” he said. “They just happen to think that I’m here on a tour of famous French painters.” He looked at me. “My mother is the one in charge of educational expenditures, and she’s a little disconnected.”

“Okay,” I said. “Listen, you both need to tell your parents. I’ll give you a couple days—three, tops—to get some kind of plan, or at least talking points, and then you’ve got to call them.”

They looked at each other.

“My mother is either going to want to throw down or join an ashram. It’s hard to say,” Charlotte said to Adam. “Elysius and Daniel will go ballistic. It won’t be pretty.”

“What’s an ashram?” Abbot asked.

“Another word for ‘community.’ It’s kind of for hippie freaks,” Adam explained quickly, and then he straightened up and said, “Well, I predict Bert and Peg will take this well. I’m the youngest. They’ve been through the fire. They may make me go to a shrink, and they’ll certainly have to up Peg’s dosages. But I don’t think this will be a total nervous breakdown or anything.”

“If you don’t tell them, then I have to,” I said.

“Well, I guess I don’t have a choice,” Charlotte said.

Adam smiled. “We can come up with some talking points together. We can manage that much.”

Charlotte nodded. “Okay,” she said.

“Are you taking vitamins?” Adam asked. It was a question I should have thought of.

“Of course,” Charlotte said. “Horse pills. I got them at the co-op health food store.”

“They’re prenatal?” Adam asked.

“Yes, they’re prenatal,” Charlotte said. “Do you want me to get out the packaging?”

“Actually, I wouldn’t mind,” he said. “There’s a lot of research on folic acid. Do they have enough folic acid in them?”

And this is the moment I kind of fell for Adam Briskowitz. He’d been doing research. He’d brought baby books with him on the plane. He went on to ask Charlotte about any morning sickness, any spotting, any lightheadedness. As far as Charlotte and the baby’s health was concerned, there was nothing the least bit scattered or philosophical about him.

ater, I tucked Abbot into bed. The injured swallow had settled down for the night in the box on the floor. He and Julien had made a small nest for it, some sticks, grass, and a dish towel, tucked in one corner of the box. It seemed to me that this joint mission—saving this swallow—held great weight for both of them. What would happen if the bird died? I felt trapped by the two options. I couldn’t suggest giving up on the bird, and yet every moment Julien and Abbot invested in it seemed to up the ante on an unwinnable bet.

Abbot’s notebook of drawings was next to him in the bed, and he was holding his flashlight, the one he liked to shine out his window some nights, “just to see what’s out there,” he said, but I also figured he used the flashlight after lights-out so that he could stay up and draw under his covers. He was flipping it off and on.

“Tell me a Henry story,” he whispered.

I didn’t tell Henry stories at home every night, far from it, but still, there had been no Henry stories since we’d arrived. There had been no Henry stories since the night Abbot asked for a
new
Henry story, the night I ended up on the front stoop and found the purple plastic egg and decided to come to France. I hadn’t wondered why before, but now I did. Abbot surely had intuited that I was coming here, in part, to try to free us from some of the grief surrounding Henry. But I wasn’t here to free us from the memory of him. I was looking for a new relationship with Henry, in a way. Our house at home was filled with mementos. I had memories of Henry built into every street corner, every park and playground, Elysius and Daniel’s house, the neighbors’ yards, the Cake Shop, the downtown, Abbot’s school. Here, Henry wasn’t so much thrown at me as I was allowed to simply carry him with me. For the first time since I arrived, I realized that my relationship with Henry had changed. It was quieter, more peaceful.

“A Henry story,” I said. I thought of Adam Briskowitz. Henry would have adored the kid. I thought of a story then, one I’d never told Abbot. “When your father was sixteen, he
was a baseball player. They won the state tournament that year. He knocked in the tying run. But he also once confessed that he bought a pipe and a smoking jacket. Your dad could be kind of funny like that.”