The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted (21 page)

hen I woke up the next morning, I was in a bed far away from my own bed. For a moment, I didn’t know what bed I was in. I’d slept in only a white bathrobe, the windows open, the night air breezing in and out. The room was empty. Empty. My things gone. For a moment, I didn’t feel like I’d been robbed; I felt like I’d been released.

I felt a pang only when I thought of the dictionary, but even then, I knew that the dictionary had already, magically, done its work. It had gotten us here. And it was better for Abbot not to think of his father as a spirit in a book that could be stolen from us.

Maybe Abbot had been right to quote my mother. Maybe the robbery was a Buddhist gift. If we’d had all of our
things—clothes, toiletries, and, most of all, technology—not to mention a working kitchen and a healthy rental car, we could have been independent, holed up here in the house. But that was the mistake that Abbot and I were making at home. Today, we would have to head out into the world.

We’d hung our clothes on a rickety wooden drying rack in Charlotte’s room. The air was so dry that the clothes dried stiff. The fabric felt strange against my skin. I remembered the feeling from my childhood—the scratchiness of the towels that dried as stiff and rough as loofahs.

While Abbot shook out our shoes—his sneakers, Charlotte’s Converses, and my clunky sandals—just to be sure there were no scorpions, I jotted a list of all the things we’d need. The list was long. We needed everything—including, most important, a charger for Charlotte’s phone.

I looked up as I wrote this down. “Forty-one missed messages?” I said to Charlotte. “Did I read that right?”

“Briskowitz,” she said. “I think he gets on there and just starts reading
The Iliad
or something. Who knows.”

“You don’t listen to his messages?”

“Nope,” she said, and then changed the subject, rolling her shoulders around in her shirt. “Does your shirt feel freshly starched, Absterizer?”

“It’s like wearing an exoskeleton,” Abbot said.

As we stepped out the back door to walk to the Dumonteils’ house for breakfast, we saw the mountain in full morning sun. It took on a bright azure, its shadows orange, looking luminous, rippling like a gown from the sky to the
earth. This seemed like the best way to step out of any house into the world.

“It’s bigger today than it was yesterday,” Abbot said.

“Seems like it, doesn’t it?” I said.

“It’s kind of humbling,” Charlotte said. In the clear light of day, I saw how different she looked without makeup and hair products that stiffened her hair. She was softer, more vulnerable, even more beautiful. I imagined all of the love stories of this place: the man who built the house, stone by stone; the couple who miraculously conceived a baby here during the mistral; my grandmother and grandfather after World War II; the flurry of Bath whites that enveloped my sister, my mother, and me one summer afternoon. And what of my mother’s lost summer?

Elysius had been proposed to here. No wonder. Was it the mountain that had worked its magic on Daniel? Perhaps. I still held on to the impact of Henry’s death, how everything had become suddenly fragile for us all. Henry proposed to me at a Red Roof Inn off of I-95, where we’d decided impulsively to have sex, midday. This was astonishing to us in retrospect only in that we’d been so damn poor, still in culinary school and broke. Sex at a Red Roof Inn was a huge luxury. It was there, perhaps inspired by the grandeur, lounging naked under the orange comforter, that Henry told me that he wanted to spill his guts.

“Okay,” I said, propping myself on my elbow.

Henry took a moment and then finally said, “I really like you.”

Now, this didn’t strike me as spilled guts. We’d been inseparable since the night of our first kiss. He’d just taken me to a family reunion on his mother’s side in North Carolina. And I’d phone-introduced him to my parents and Elysius. We’d pretty much covered the liking, even the
really
liking. I said, “I don’t think that constitutes having spilled your guts.”

“How about this?” He paused and then said, “I’m in love with you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

Now this,
this
was spilled guts. It was completely courageous and elegant, especially amid the Red Roof Inn decor, paintings bolted to the walls. I took this as a real proposal. I said, “Yes,” as in
I accept
, as in
I do
. “I love you, too.”

This was the moment that we always came back to. The wedding that followed, with all of its foofaraw, was nothing in light of this essential moment that we considered to be the start of our marriage. We’d talked about how embedded in every marriage there was a true moment when your hearts sign on for good. It didn’t necessarily happen when the guy mows
WILL YOU MARRY ME
into your lawn or trains a puppy to bring you a velvet box. It doesn’t necessarily happen in the white hoop gown or because some exhausted justice of the peace says so. It usually happens in some quiet moment, one that often goes unregistered. It can happen while you’re brushing your teeth together or sitting in a broken-down car with an engine that just won’t budge. Some unplanned, unscripted moment. And this was ours. This beginning was finalized
by the two of us, unceremoniously, stealing mini hotel soaps and shampoo bottles from a Red Roof Inn.

I wasn’t jealous of Elysius and Daniel’s proposal—though, granted, it made a much better story. But I was jealous that they’d gotten to be here together to create a love story. Henry and I wouldn’t have that chance, and I was a little pissed at us for not making the time and/or blowing the money. We should have, but we were taking time for granted.

Abbot, Charlotte, and I made our way down a small path worn in the grass from our back door to the Dumonteils’ back door. We walked up the steps and gave a knock.

“Entrez-vous!” a woman’s voice called out.

We stepped into the cool, dark foyer at the back of the house. There was a richly ruby-colored Persian runner on the floor, orangey and pink, that stretched down the length of the hall all the way to the front door, which stood with brightly lit panes at the other end.

Véronique appeared from the doorway on the right—the kitchen—wielding a cane and hobbling around on her cast. I still wasn’t sure what had happened to her. She clapped flour from her hands—small bursts of white clouds. Again, we did the ritual cheek kisses. There were pleasantries.

“Look at this boy!” she said about Abbot. “He has a little of you. A little!”

This made Abbot proud because it meant he had a lot of his father.

Julien walked down a set of pantry stairs and dipped
under the low doorframe into the room. I didn’t remember his being so tall, though he was slouching, a little beaten from the night before. His eyes looked bleary; his hair was a mess of curls, a bit matted down on one side. He was unshaven, wearing white pants, a white shirt without a collar, and he was barefoot.

Evidently, he hadn’t expected to run into anyone. “I was coming down to steal breakfast.” I noticed that his nose had a French buckle on the bridge, and he had beautiful teeth that flashed when he spoke and one dimple that was slightly girlish. I remembered his face when he was a child, this time on Bastille Day, lit up by the celebratory paper globes that swayed on the ends of sticks. He gave a small shrug and then did the polite thing. He bounded across the kitchen and gave all of us kisses on either cheek.

“What happened to your foot?” Abbot asked Véronique.

“I fell in mounting the stairs,” she said, “like an old woman. It is broken. The month past, I asked a girl from the village to help me, but she had legs like a colt—big knees, no balance. She was too young and tired to comprehend work. So now Julien is helping me, but I don’t need it.” She wagged her finger at him. “Julien, show them the dining room. I will arrive in an instant,” she said.

Julien led us down the hall. “Did you sleep well?” he asked.

“Did you?” I asked.

He smiled that old sheepish smile from our childhood. “Fine,” he said, rubbing his head with his knuckles.

“No scorpions were in our shoes this morning,” Abbot said.

“The scorpions are rare. Probably you will not see one,” he said.

“Probably?” Abbot muttered.

“Where’s Cami this morning?” I asked, knowing that I was prying.

“At home,” he said, not really supplying any information.

He walked into the dining room. There were two hungover archaeologists at the far end of the table, and they lifted their heads. One gave a shout. “Bonne anniversaire!”—happy birthday.

Julien smiled. “Merci!” he said, with a quick smile and a nod.

“You didn’t tell us it was your birthday,” I said.

“It’s not my birthday. There’s a confusion.”

“I lied about my birthday once,” Charlotte said, “to get a free dessert at Olive Garden.”

“They think that the party last night was for my birthday.”

“And what was it for?” I asked.

“Just for living,” he said.

Aside from the two hungover archaeologists, the dining room was elegant. The walls were covered in portraits, oil paintings of ancestors, I assumed. A lowboy was covered with trays—pastries, coffee, sugar cubes, cream, a loaf of bread, a bowl of berries, butter, jelly—as well as gorgeous pots, glazed in brilliant blues and reds. We sat in regal, tall-backed chairs at the far end of the table, giving the suffering
archaeologists space. They drank a lot of coffee—bowls of it, actually, dipping in their crusts of bread with butter and jam. They mumbled to each other in French.

While we were eating, I asked Abbot if he remembered when he was little and I tried to teach him French.

“No,” Abbot said. “Was Dad there, helping teach me French?”

“He took French in high school, so he helped some,” I said. “You would get so mad. You’d clamp your hands over your ears and scream. Once you told me that you hated it because French had a different word for everything.”

“A wise child,” Charlotte said.

Abbot laughed and shoved butter into a hole he’d scooped out of his bread. The archaeologists shuffled off, looking bleary and already dusty.

Julien leaned on the table and said, “My mother and I have a plan. I can take you to the police station in Trets and to the supermarket there. I am happy to drive you. Meanwhile, the children can help my mother. And this afternoon, you will walk the land with my mother, Heidi. You will talk with her alone.”

“Will the supermarket have clothes?” I asked. “Is it that kind of superstore?”

“It will have everything.”

“I don’t think they’re going to have stores that sell the kinds of clothes I wear,” Charlotte said. “My clothes are kind of ironic. Does France do ironic?”

“No one you know will see you here,” I said. “You can get away with some unironic clothes for a while.”

“I could also take the family to the cathedral in Saint Maximin later today,” Julien offered.

Abbot let out a sad sigh. He’d had his fill of cathedrals.

“This cathedral has a crypt,” Julien said, in response to the sigh. “I could also throw in some … what do you call them? Pigs with big teeth?”

“Pigs with big teeth?” Charlotte said.

“This type of big teeth,” Julien said, gesturing tusks.

“Warthogs!” Abbot said.

“Yes, maybe warthogs,” Julien said.

“How many warthogs?” Abbot asked.

“About thirty, maybe more. Do you want to come?”

Abbot thought about it and nodded.

ulien and I rolled out of the driveway and onto the main road. My rental car was no longer on the roadside. Julien told me that they would be sending me a new car. They would deliver it to the house. “So,” he said, “I am your chauffeur now!”

We drove through Puyloubier, past the patisserie and boulangerie, and the petite église with its silent bell, and then the road widened, spreading into the vineyards on the slopes of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Julien shifted out of the village-paced second and third gears, taking it up to highway speed
on the D12, still a country round, then up to fourth and fifth so that the vineyards clipped by on either side. He was the kind of French driver I’d already come to fear.