The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted (45 page)

Still, I got out of the car. I walked up a set of stone steps—on and on, dozens of steps. At the top, there was a platform. I looked up at the church, and now I could see the statue on the bell tower—the Madonna and Child in brilliant, almost iridescent gold.

I heard my name. I turned and there he was. Julien, alone, standing by a stone wall. Behind him, there was a packed, sprawling city, a dark, massive port, cranes and freight ships, and then the sea, stretching out endlessly.

I walked to him. The wind ruffled our hair, billowed our shirts. His eyes were wet, shining. “It’s a little cloudy,” I said. “It might rain.”

“Did you come to tell me about the weather?”

“You’re driving a convertible with a broken top,” I said. “I thought you might want to know.”

I was breathless from climbing the stairs, windswept. He walked up close to me, so close, I could feel his warm breath. He wrapped his arms around my waist and kissed me. This was not the soft and tender kiss amid the glowing paper lanterns. I felt this kiss run through my body, swaying my back. He lifted me off the ground and, still kissing, I held his face in my hands. How long did this last? Time no longer existed.
Slowly, I slid down his body, my shoes touching back down to earth.

“I bought something for you.” He reached into his pocket, hiding something in his fist.

I took his hand, turned it over, and opened his fingers one by one. There, in his palm, there was a little plastic barrette. It was red with a flower. “For me?”

He reached up and lifted a strand of my hair from my face. He clipped the barrette, pinning back a few wisps.

“Do you want to give this a try?” I asked.

“It will be complicated.”

“Everything is. I’d prefer to be complicated with you rather than complicated without you,” I said.

“We have kids,” he said. “We live on two different continents.”

“And that isn’t even the hardest part.”

“What will be the hardest part?” He wrapped his arms around me now. I put my head on his chest, listened to his heart. He rested his chin on top of my head.

I said, “I don’t know if it’s fair.”

“What is fair?”

“You have to know that I will always love Henry.”

“But that is what is good about you. You will always love Henry. He’s part of you. And I want to love all of you.”

“We’ll practice joy,” I whispered.

“We’ll try to live a little.”

here is one more small miracle.

It’s summer again. Charlotte is giving the baby—a three-month-old named Pearl—a bath in the tub. The baby is beautiful, with Charlotte’s eyes. Julien is standing at the back window, looking after Abbot, who’s drawing swallows in the fields out by the dig with Frieda, who will be with us all summer. Patricia and Pascal are going through a rough patch. Julien stayed with us off and on throughout the year in Florida, and when Frieda wasn’t with her mother, she came, too. It’s been more complicated than we could even have imagined—or should I say complex? Why would we want simple?

And I’m baking pastries in the kitchen, which has a shiny new oven but is still unfinished. I’m not sure the renovations will ever be done. I keep the old. I add the new. I don’t make
decisions. I just listen. It’s a slow process—the ox and the patient earth. Right now, the whole house smells like a bakery and that is a renovation of its own.

Soon, Elysius, Daniel, and my mother and father will arrive—my father seeing the place for the first time. My parents will take the fourth bedroom, which I painted ivory just for my mother.

Charlotte, with the baby in a sling, has spent the morning with Véronique in her kitchen, preparing the meal. And I’m in charge of dessert, as it should be. I’ve used the recipes from the charred box so many times in the Cake Shop this year that I no longer even have to glance at them. The recipes are within me, deeply rooted, and even as I make these tarts, I’m making small changes, little tweaks and variations. I’ve started making wedding cakes again here and there, but Charlotte tells me I’ll never make one for her and Adam. They’re parents—good ones—and best friends, but no longer in a relationship. It was too much pressure. “Maybe one day?” I’ve said to Charlotte, but she only shrugs. Adam will arrive midsummer and stay for a month. For now, though, it is this strange family of the six of us, making this house our own, if only for the summer. And can I simply say that throughout every day, it strikes me that Charlotte is an incredible mother? In fact, she mothers with such patience and grace that she’s elegant, timelessly elegant. Ironically enough, one might even say that she has become forever elegant after all.

There’s a knock at the front door, three loud sharp raps
of the knuckles—a cop knock, as Henry would have put it. No one ever uses the front door.

“I’ll get it,” Julien says.

I’m so curious that I have to follow, even though my hands are dusted in confectioners’ sugar.

Julien opens the door, and there stands the police officer from the Trets police station the summer before. He’s still wearing his sweater vest. He’s holding a small suitcase on wheels. “Allô!” he says.

“Bonjour,” Julien and I say.

“You two are together,” he says, with a wink. “I said that you were and you did not believe. But now you do?”

I look at Julien. “Now we do,” I say.

We invite the officer in. He sets the suitcase down on its wheels and pulls it along. It is beaten, faded, worn. But the police officer looks triumphant. “This is yours?” he says.

“I think so,” I say.

Charlotte emerges from the bathroom, her face moist, holding the baby, tightly wrapped in a thin blanket. “Who is it?”

“Could you call Abbot and Frieda in from the field?” I ask.

She nods and walks quickly out of the room. I can hear her voice, calling for them out the back door.

“I found this,” the officer says. “And I remember you. You are friends with Daryl Hannah, no?”

“No,” I tell him. “I never really said that.”

He sighs. “Well.” He waves away this detail. “This is something stolen from you by the thieves, no?”

Abbot and Frieda run in to the room, see the cop, and freeze.

“Bonjour,” the officer says, in a very officious tone.

“Bonjour!” they answer in unison.

Charlotte walks in, patting the baby’s back. “What’s going on? Is that your suitcase, Absterizer?”

Abbot looks at me. “Is it?”

“I think so,” I say.

The officer tips the handle toward me. My hands are covered with sugar, and so Julien takes it and lays it on the floor so that Abbot can have at it. He kneels down, and Frieda plops cross-legged beside him, her frizzy curls bouncing around her head.

“The suitcase was left on the side of the road all year. But it was found and I remember this detail!” the officer says. “You put a star next to this one item on your list. And I did not forget this star!”

Abbot unzips the dirty suitcase and opens it. The clothes smell bad. They’re dry but mildewed. Frieda holds her nose and shakes her head, scooting away. But Abbot picks through the clothes until he finds what he’s looking for. “Mom,” he says, “it’s still here.” He pulls out the dictionary. The binding is warped, and the cover is deeply rippled. It’s dried but a little swollen. Abbot opens it up to the inscription, which is blurred but legible.

“Le dictionaire!”
the officer says, beaming. “It’s been discovered!”

Frieda looks at Abbot, confused.

“It was gone,” he tells her. “It’s special and it was gone, but it came home to us!” And this was home, just like that.
Home
. The dictionary came home to us, like my mother after the lost summer, like the letters I sent her, like every small sadness that—strangely, and when you least expect it—can return as joy.

Julien puts his arm around me, and I grab the front of his shirt with one fist. “It’s a gift,” he says. “Take the gift.”

“It’s all a gift,” I tell him. “All of it.”

~le fin~

I would like to thank the villagers of Puyloubier for their hospitality and incredible patience, especially the beautiful and warmhearted Laurent and Jerome, who were generous beyond measure. I would like to thank the glamorous duo, the mayor and his wife, Frédéric and Beatrice Guinieri, and J.F., for his graciousness. Elizabeth Dumon, thank you for answering all of my questions about your gorgeous home, land, vineyard, and Gallo-Roman dig, as well as your fantastic cuisine. Thank you for being so kind to the multiple generations of my family. Kevin Walsh, I very much appreciate all of the information about the archaeological dig and your important work in the field. Thank you, Melina, for getting us all set up, and Eric for being a man of action. And, after the robbery, we relied on the generosity of Helene Mitchell and her husband, the witty Brit. Thank you. (While I’m at it, I’ll thank their dinner guest, Neal, who made a deep and lasting impression on me, giving me a charge that I will spend
my life trying to fulfill.) A thankful shout-out to the Trets Police Department! And, yes, Bastien, our occasional extra kid, thank you for the lessons! Jacob Newberry, thank you for the translation help. Frankie Giampietro, how I’ve come to rely on you and your brilliant mind. Thank you, Florida State University. Margaret Kyle, thank you for your insight into the artistry of pastries—the blur of food and love. Linda Richards, master pastry chef, thank you for allowing me into the world of The Cake Shop, a beautiful place to dream. And I thank those kids in tow, the ones who gave me the child’s-eye view—Ph., F., T., O., and Lola. And, as ever, thank you to David. Let me say it again—yes.

Thank you, Nat Sobel.
Il faut d’abord durer!

And thank you, most of all, Caitlin Alexander, my worldclass editor. I am indebted. Thank you for all of the love and care you poured into the making of this book.

If you enjoyed
The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted
,
you won’t want to miss any of Bridget Asher’s novels.

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“An undiluted joy to read … Don’t miss this ride.”

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Available now from Bantam Books

That summer when I first became Elliot Hull’s pretend wife, I understood only vaguely that complicated things often prefer to masquerade as simple things at first. This is why they’re so hard to avoid, or at least brace for. I should have known this—it was built into my childhood. But I didn’t see the complications of Elliot Hull coming, perhaps because I didn’t want to. So I didn’t avoid them or even brace for them, and as a result, I eventually found myself in winter watching two grown men—my pretend husband and my real husband—wrestle on a front lawn amid a spray of golf clubs in the snow—such a blur of motion in the dim porch light that I couldn’t distinguish one man from the other. This would
become one of the most vaudevillian and poignant moments of my life, when things took the sharpest turn in a long and twisted line of smaller, seemingly simple turns.

Here is the simple beginning: I was standing in line in a crowded ice-cream shop—the whir of a blender, the fogged glass counter, the humidity pouring in from the door with its jangling bell. It was late summer, one of the last hot days of the season. The air-conditioning was rolling down from overhead and I’d paused under one of the cool currents, causing a small hiccup in the line. Peter was off talking to someone from work: Gary, a fellow anesthesiologist—a man in a pink-striped polo shirt, surrounded by his squat children holding ice-cream cones melting into softened napkins. The kids were small enough not to care that they were eating bits of their napkins along with the ice cream. And Gary was too distracted to notice. He was clapping Peter on the back and laughing loudly, which is what people do to Peter. I’ve never understood why, exactly, except that people genuinely like him. He’s disarming, affable. There’s something about him, the air of someone who’s in the club—what club, I don’t know, but he seemed to be the laid-back president of this club, and when you were talking with him, you were in the club too. But my mind was on the kids in that moment—I felt sorry for them, and I decided that one day I’d be the kind of mother not to let her children eat bits of soggy napkin. I don’t remember what kind of mother mine was—distracted or hovering or, most likely, both? She died when I was five years old. In some pictures, she’s doting on me—cutting
a birthday cake outside, her hair flipping up in the breeze. But in group photos, she’s always the one looking off to the side, down in her own lap, or to some distant point beyond the photographer—like an avid bird-watcher. And my father was not a reliable source of information. It pained him, so he rarely talked about her.