The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted (28 page)

hen I woke up the next morning, I called my mother. It had been too late yesterday, what with the time difference, but nine in the morning our time would be three in the afternoon in Florida.

She picked up and I started in directly. “So, two to three months for permits and just to get quotes? Is that the bureaucracy you were talking about?”

“Heidi, what are you talking about?”

“I’m not going to get anything rolling here. I’ll be lucky to nudge this renovation in six weeks’ time.”

“Ah,” she said. “Yes, but—”

“But nothing!” I said. “You made me come here under false pretenses. Feeling and connecting and allowing decisions to form! Listen to the house?”

“And I stand by it. I want you to do all of those things.”

The line was silent. Of course, the renovation was only the surface issue. I had told myself that I didn’t want to know about her lost summer, but I couldn’t help myself. It seemed only fair that I should know what was going on. I was here, after all, feeling haunted by her lost summer. I hit her with this question. “So, do you mind if I ask you a question?”

“Anything,” she said.

“What did you steal?”

“Steal? What are you talking about?”

“It seems you have a reputation in the South of France as a thief.”

“I do not.”

“Well, maybe not the entire region, but certainly right in these parts here.”

“Who told you I stole something?”

“Véronique.”

The line went quiet.

“I don’t know what she’s talking about.”

“Huh,” I said.

“What do you mean,
huh
?”

“You’re blushing or something.”

“I’m in America. How would you know whether I’m blushing or not?”

“I can tell by the sound of your voice.”

“Okay, then.” She cleared her throat. “I did not steal anything to my knowledge from Véronique.”

“I didn’t say that she said you stole something from her.”

“Yes, you did.” She was flustered.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Actually, she says that she also has something for you. Something you left behind. It was found after the fire.”

“In the kitchen?”

“She didn’t say. But the fire was mostly in the kitchen.” I remembered how rattled my mother was the day of Elysius’s wedding. She’d started crying. She said she didn’t know why she was reacting that way, but now I thought I might. “Is this why you were so upset by the house fire?” I said.

“No. I just didn’t want anyone to have been hurt or the house to be ruined,” she said.

“But you knew no one was hurt and you knew it was a kitchen fire,” I said. “What was in the kitchen that you left behind?”

“Did Véronique say what was found?”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“I didn’t answer your question on purpose. I don’t know what she found in the kitchen. How could I?”

“You left something behind in the kitchen, something found because of the fire. So it must have been hidden and the fire exposed it somehow.” I thought of what Véronique had told me about the air in Provence in the summer: because it was so dry, it made the mountain ripe for fires, and that the fires of 1989 were what made it possible for the archaeologists to dig. Maybe it wasn’t a metaphor, as I’d thought it was. Maybe it was a fact. Maybe she was speaking of what had been unearthed in our own kitchen. “Were you afraid that the fire had destroyed it?”

“I really don’t know what she’s found. I don’t know what
it
is!”

But I knew that she had a very good idea of what it was. “Véronique said it was nothing, really, but that it would be important to you. What is it? Take a wild guess.”

“Well, I’m sure it’s nothing important or I would have asked to have it returned a long time ago. Right? How is my Abbot? How is Charlotte doing away from that Adam Briskowitz?” She was now diverting attention. I let her. What more was there to say? I was convinced that she was a thief, and she had hidden something in the kitchen, something that she likely knew she’d never find again but couldn’t give up.

ulien had gone to London to do some work for his main client. He hadn’t said goodbye. That morning when I went to the Dumonteils’ for breakfast, he simply wasn’t there. His mother said, “It was an emergency. Work. He told me to say that he will be back in a week or so.”

“A week or so?”

She looked at me a little startled. Had I said it like I was disappointed that he’d be gone so long?

Was I disappointed? I pushed the thought aside.

I realized that there was no way that I would be able to navigate the complexities—cultural and bureaucratic—of renovating the house. I asked Véronique for the equivalent of a contractor—a project manager or, as the French say, an
entrepreneur
. It would cost an additional 10 to 15 percent, but what alternative did I have?

“I know a man who is very good and honest and well known,” she told me. “And the economy isn’t perfect, so maybe you will not wait.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I really appreciate this.”

She nodded. “Not a problem.”

In the meanwhile, I was bent on doing everything that we could do ourselves. I made a list of things that didn’t require
permis de construire
and
devis:
weeding, planting, painting, removing ash from tile and stone.

As those first few days progressed, we learned quickly not to sleep in. The morning hours were cool, best for working outdoors, not to be wasted.

Every morning, Abbot shook out our shoes, still on the lookout for scorpions, but now, oddly enough, he seemed frustrated that he didn’t find them. “Where are the scorpions?” he said one morning. “I mean, the book said there would be scorpions!”

“I was here a lot as a kid,” I broke it to him, “and I never saw a scorpion.”

Abbot, Charlotte, and I worked the yard, uprooting weeds, clipping vines. We planted, too. Charlotte asked Véronique what was best to put in this time of year. She produced a list of annuals—marigolds, cosmos, petunias—and the flowers that would bloom in the fall after we were gone—chrysanthemums, asters, colchicums.

I worked in the kitchen without the kids, wearing one of
Véronique’s handkerchiefs over my nose and mouth. I jettisoned the braided rug, demolished the burnt cabinets. Véronique gave me free use of all the tools in the garage. She called in a few locals to pull out the oven and take it away in the bed of a truck. I scrubbed the stone with a wire brush and a hot, sudsy mixture that Véronique conjured up for me in a large bucket. I wiped down the tiled backsplash, the tiled floors. It felt good to strip the kitchen down. It felt personal and cleansing. It was a transformation that was gratifying because it was so visual.

I kept tabs on the Cake Shop from afar. Véronique let us use the computer that she kept in a quiet corner off the kitchen, and I checked emails sporadically. Jude kept me posted on all things to do with the Cake Shop, including sales of a popular ice coffee she’d invented called the Cooliocino. Abbot even checked in on his own email, but Charlotte had no interest. She refused to even peek.

The rental car agency brought us a new Renault, and I drove into Aix often, so that I could begin to get a
feel
for what might be out there, begin to
connect
—like new tiles for the bathroom and kitchen backsplash—without
making
decisions. While we waited for a proper oven to be installed—a process that, with all of the damage, would take time—I bought a hot plate, a microwave, and a Crock-Pot so that we could survive. Still, Véronique often insisted that we eat our meals with her.

My favorite errand was to the patisserie. I visited every
couple of days for fresh pastries. The baker was always pleased to see me because, I assumed, I always bought so very much and always wanted to try anything new. He spoke to me only in French and told me once that he remembered me from when I was little and came in with my mother. He remembered that it was my sister who looked like my mother back then.

But he told me now that I was like my mother.
Your quick eyes and your gestures
.

I told him, as I had Véronique, that it was my sister who looked more like her, really.

But he raised his finger and shook his head.
I’m right
, he assured me.
I’m right, absolutely
.

I didn’t disagree. Maybe there was something the same about a mother and a daughter at a certain time in their lives when they’re both lost—something that shines from within and is undeniable.

Once he asked how my mother was doing these days, and it made me think of Julien, the way he’d waited for news from us as kids. I imagined all of the shopkeepers in the tiny village getting used to us one summer and then, like migratory birds, we would reappear the next year or maybe not until the one after that.

But despite my visits to the patisserie, I still had no desire to bake. I had no desire to make the cakes that I found so beautiful, so perfect. Normally I would have been inspired, especially since these desserts touched something deep inside
of me, the memory of my mother in the kitchen when I finally had her back again. But, no. I only wanted to eat them, to delight in each bite, to be fed.

Sometimes Charlotte and Abbot came with me on errands, but usually they wanted to stay behind. Abbot liked to watch the archaeologists squatting in the dig with their small delicate tools and brushes. Sometimes they became animated and shouted to each other. Their work was painstaking. They dug only a quarter of an inch at a time and then documented. At first Charlotte and I stood out there with him, but I became comfortable allowing Abbot to go out on his own, and the archaeologists got used to his dogged shadow and let him linger at the edges under an umbrella that he’d found in a large cupboard under the stairs.

The dig was the footprint of a Gallo-Roman villa, and, not far from it, a tomb. The dig was about a five-minute walk from the back door, but the ground was flat, the mountain rising up beyond them, and so we could see Abbot’s small figure amid the larger ones.

I could tell why Abbot was fascinated. They’d unearthed an ancient fountain, a system of aqueducts, a tiling pattern of small crosses, a hearth, one room after the next. And all of it had been lying there under the brush stripped by the fires of 1989, and then hidden by only about a foot of earth.

Eventually, they showed Abbot the tools: trowels, brushes, dental picks, tape measures, line levels, screens for sifting. They talked to him about what they found, how
things had been made, why the people had settled here, and why perhaps they’d left.

The archaeologists were very serious workers. One was a thin, fair-haired but suntanned Brit who was lithe and spry, seemingly the one in charge of things. When they let loose at night, they were wild, as Julien had said. Day in and day out, though, they were reserved, digging away, awaiting something to celebrate, it seemed. They had a limited amount of time in the field. Most had to return to universities to teach in the fall, and they worked long hours. In the evenings, Abbot described how the archaeologists thought the people who’d lived in the villa cooked their food and took care of their babies.

“They were real people,” he said.

I wondered if it gave him perspective. If there was something about the fact that people live and die and leave things behind and centuries pass that was helping him with his father’s death and with the idea of life and death in general—or did it make life seem too fleeting? I wasn’t sure, but it seemed important to him, and so I let him spend time out there, perhaps figuring something out, something important. In any case, it seemed like it would do no good keeping him from it.

Each time I took a break from painting the bedrooms, I kept an eye on him from my favorite spot in the lawn chair, absorbing the view of the mountain.

And Charlotte kept an eye out for him from the wide
window in Véronique’s kitchen. It turned out that Charlotte was quite good in the kitchen, better than the French teenager with legs like a colt, as Véronique had described her. Charlotte was efficient, patient, well organized. She followed Véronique’s curt instructions. It reminded me of being with my mother after she returned. I wondered if Charlotte, too, was drawn to Véronique and the moist steam of the kitchen because of some deep desire for an attentive, sure-handed mother. Véronique quietly praised Charlotte in my presence. “She asks the right questions,” she said. “She has smart hands that know what to do, when.”