The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted E-Book

Bridget Asher

• Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 511

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

'Every good love story has another love hiding within it.' Brokenhearted and still mourning the loss of her husband, Heidi travels with Abbott, her obsessive-compulsive seven-year-old son, and Charlotte, her jaded sixteen-year-old niece, to the small village of Puyloubier in the south of France, where a crumbling stone house may be responsible for mending hearts since before World War II. There, Heidi discovers a shocking secret and learns the truth about her mother's 'lost summer' when Heidi was a child. As three generations collide with one another, with the neighbour who seems to know all of their family skeletons, and with an enigmatic Frenchman, Heidi, Charlotte, and Abbot journey through love, loss, and healing amid the vineyards, warm winds and delicious food of Provence. Can the magic of the house heal Heidi's heart, too?

Leseprobe

The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted

Bridget Asher

This novel is dedicated to the reader.

Contents

Title PageDedicationHere is one way to say itPart OneEver since Henry’s deathMy sister and I went to the houseMy mother had led us insideI can say that ElysiusFrom my seat in the diningThere was a Henry storyI found myself walking intoThat night when I was puttingPart TwoAnd so the lost summerFour days after arriving in ParisWhen I woke up the next morningIn the gusty wind of the convertibleWhen you’ve felt shut downWhen I woke up the next morningHow was I wrongThat night, we all ate dinner togetherOver the course of the next three daysBefore the celebrations of Bastille Day beganThe next dayI couldn’t go to dinnerThree rangers arrived on the scene like minersI slept fitfully and woke up wonderingThe mountain was a forceI read the lettersI decided to circle awayThere is one more small miracleAcknowledgementsThe Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted Family DinnerRecipesDessert RecipesWebsitesAbout the AuthorCopyright

Here is one way to say it

Here is one way to say it: Grief is a love story told backward.

Or maybe that’s not it at all. Maybe I should be more scientific. Love and the loss of that love exist in equal measure. Hasn’t an equation like this been invented by a romantic physicist somewhere?

Or maybe I should put it this way: Imagine a snow globe. Imagine a tiny snow-struck house inside of it. Imagine there’s a woman inside of that tiny house sitting on the edge of her bed, shaking a snow globe, and within that snow globe, there is a tiny snow-struck house with a woman inside of it, and this one is standing in the kitchen, shaking another snow globe, and within that snow globe …

Every good love story has another love hiding within it.

Part One

Ever since Henry’s death

Ever since Henry’s death, I’d been losing things.

I lost keys, sunglasses, checkbooks. I lost a spatula and found it in the freezer, along with a bag of grated cheese.

I lost a note to Abbot’s third-grade teacher explaining how I’d lost his homework.

I lost the caps to toothpaste and jelly jars. I put these things away open-mouthed, lidless, airing. I lost hairbrushes and shoes – not just one of a pair, but both.

I left jackets behind in restaurants, my pocketbook under my seat at the movies, my keys on the checkout counter of the drugstore – afterward, I sat in my car for a moment, disoriented, trying to place exactly what was wrong and then trudged back into the store, where the checkout girl jingled them for me above her head.

I got calls from people who were kind enough to return things. And when things were gone – just gone – I retraced my steps and then got lost myself. Why am I here at this mini mart? Why am I back at the deli counter?

I lost track of friends. They had babies, defended dissertations, had art showings and dinner parties and backyard barbecues …

Most of all, I lost track of large swaths of time. Kids at Abbot’s bus stop and in the neighborhood and in his class and on his Little League team kept inching taller all around me. Abbot kept growing, too. That was the hardest to take.

I also lost track of small pieces of time – late mornings, evenings. Sometimes I would look up and it was suddenly dark outside, as if someone had flipped a switch. The fact of the matter was, life charged on without me. This realization still caught me off guard even two years later, although by this point it had become a habit, a simple unavoidable fact: The world charged on and I did not.

So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me that Abbot and I were running late for the bridesmaid bonding on the morning of my sister’s wedding. We had spent the morning playing Apples to Apples, interrupted by phone calls from the Cake Shop.

‘Jude … Jude, slow down. Five hundred lemon tarts?’ I stood up from the couch where Abbot was eating his third freezer pop of the morning – the kind that come in vivid colors packaged in plastic tubes that you have to snip with scissors and that sometimes make you cough. Even this detail is pained: Abbot and I had been reduced to eating frozen juice in plastic. ‘No, no, I’m sure,’ I continued. ‘I would have written down the order. At least … Shit. This is probably my fault. Do you want me to come in?’

Henry hadn’t only been my husband; he’d also been my business partner. I’d grown up making delicate pastries, thinking of food as a kind of art, but Henry had convinced me that food is love. We’d met during culinary school, and shortly after Abbot was born we’d embarked on another labor of love: the Cake Shop.

Jude had been with us from the start. She was a single mom – petite, mouthy, with short bleached-out hair and a heart-shaped face – that strange combination of beauty and toughness. She was our first hire and had a natural flair, a great sense of design, and marketing savvy. After Henry’s death, she’d stepped up. Henry had been the one to handle the business side of things, and I’d have lost the shop, I’m quite sure, if it weren’t for Jude. Jude became the guiding force, my rudder. She kept things going.

I was about to tell Jude that I’d be at the shop in half an hour when Abbot reached up and tugged on my sleeve. He pointed at the watch he wore, its face in the shape of a baseball. Perhaps as a result of my spaciness, Abbot insisted on keeping his own time.

When I realized that it was now after noon, I shouted, ‘The wedding! I’m so sorry! I’ve got to go!’ then hung up the phone.

Abbot, wide-eyed, said, ‘Auntie Elysius is going to be so mad!’ He leant over to scratch a mosquito bite on his ankle. He was wearing his short white sports socks and his ankle looked like it had a golfer’s tan, but really it was dirt.

‘Not if we hurry!’ I said. ‘And grab some calamine lotion so you don’t itch during the ceremony.’

We darted around our little three-bedroom bungalow madly. I found one of my heels in the closet and the other in Abbot’s bedroom in a big tub of Legos. Abbot was wrestling on his rented tux. He struggled with the tiny cuff buttons, searching for the clip-on tie and cummerbund – he’d chosen red because it was the color that Henry had worn at our wedding. I wasn’t sure that was healthy, but didn’t want to draw attention to it.

I threw on makeup and slipped the bridesmaid’s dress over my head, grateful that the dress wasn’t your typical bridesmaid’s horror show – my sister had exquisite taste, and this was the most expensive dress I’d ever worn, including my own wedding dress.

When I’d declined the role of Elysius’s matron of honor – or was it, to be grimly accurate, widow of honor? – my sister had been visibly relieved. She knew that I’d only gum up the works. In a heartbeat, she’d called an old college friend with a marketing degree, and I was happily demoted to bridesmaid. Abbot had been enlisted as the ring bearer, and to be honest, I didn’t even feel like I was up for the role of mother-of-the-ring-bearer. I’d made a last-minute excuse to get out of the rehearsal dinner the night before and that day’s spa treatment and group hair appointment. When your husband has died, you’re allowed to just say, ‘I can’t make it. I’m so sorry.’ If your husband died in a car accident, like mine, you’re allowed to say, ‘I just can’t drive today.’ You can simply shake your head and whisper, ‘Sorry.’ And people excuse you, immediately, as if this is the least they can do for you. And perhaps it is.

This was wearing on my sister, however. She’d made me promise that I would be at her house two hours before the wedding. There was a strict agenda that we had to stick to, and it included drinking mimosas with all of the bridesmaids while each gave an intimate little toast. Elysius likes it when the world finds her as its proper axis. I couldn’t judge her for that; I was painfully aware of how selfish my grief was. My eight-year-old son had lost his father. Henry’s parents had lost their son. And Henry lost his life. What right did I have to use Henry’s death as an excuse – time and again – to check out?

‘Can I bring my snorkel stuff?’ Abbot called down the hallway.

‘Pack an overnight bag and bring the gear,’ I said, shoving things into a small suitcase of my own. My sister lived only twenty minutes away – a quick ride from Tallahassee to the countryside in Capps – but she wanted family to spend the night. It was an opportunity to capture my mother’s attention and mine and hold it for as long as possible – to relive the strong bond the three of us had once had. ‘You can snorkel in the morning with Pop-pop.’

Abbot ran out of his bedroom, sliding down the hall to my doorway, still wearing his sports socks. He was holding the cummerbund in one hand and the clip-on bow tie in the other. ‘I can’t get these to stick on!’ he said. His starched collar was sticking up by his cheeks, like the Halloween he dressed as Count Dracula.

‘Don’t worry about it. Just bring it all.’ I was fussing with the clasp of a string of pearls my mother had lent me for the occasion. ‘There will be ladies there with nervous energy and nothing to do. They’ll fix you up.’

‘Where will you be?’ he asked with an edge of anxiety in his voice. Since Henry’s death, Abbot had become a worrier. He’d started rubbing his hands together, a new tic – a little frenzy, the charade of a vigorous hand-washing. He’d become a germophobe. We’d seen a therapist, but it hadn’t helped. He did this when he was anxious and also when he sensed I was brooding. I tried not to brood in front him, but it turned out that I wasn’t good at faking chipper, and my fake chipperness made him more nervous than my brooding – a vicious cycle. Now that his father was gone, did he feel more vulnerable in the world? I did.

‘I’ll be with the other bridesmaids doing mandatory bridesmaidish things,’ I reassured him. It was at this moment that I remembered that I was supposed to have my toast prepared. I’d written a toast on a napkin in the kitchen and, of course, had since lost it and now couldn’t remember anything I’d written. ‘What nice things should I say about Auntie Elysius? I have to come up with something for a toast.’

‘She has very white teeth and buys very good presents,’ Abbot said.

‘Beauty and generosity,’ I said. ‘I can work with that. This is going to all be fine. We’re going to enjoy ourselves!’

He looked at me, checking to see if I was being honest, the way a lawyer might look at his client to see what he’s really in for. I was used to this kind of scrutiny. My mother, my sister, my friends, neighbors, even customers at the Cake Shop, asked me how I was while trying to ferret out the real truth in my answer. I knew I should have been moving forward. I should have been working more, eating better, exercising, dating. Whenever I went out, I had to be prepared for an ambush by some do-good acquaintance ready to dispense pity and uplifting sentiments, questions, and advice. I practiced, ‘No, really, I’m fine. Abbot and I are doing great!’

I hated, too, that I had to do all of this fending off of pity in front of Abbot. I wanted to be honest with him and to protect him at the same time. And, of course, I wasn’t being honest. This was the first wedding I’d been to since Henry’s death. I’d always been a crier at weddings, even the ones of people I didn’t know well, even TV weddings. I was afraid of myself now. If I could bawl at a commercial of a wedding, how would I react to this one?

I couldn’t look at Abbot. If I did, he’d know I was faking it. We’re going to enjoy ourselves? I was hoping merely to survive.

I moved to the full-length mirror that Henry had attached to the back of my closet door. Henry was everywhere, but when a memory appeared – the mirror had tipped when he was trying to install it and nearly broke in half – I tried not to linger. Lingering was a weakness. I knew to fix my attention on something small and manageable. I was now trying – a last-ditch effort – to put the pearl necklace on with the help of my reflection.

‘I like it better when you don’t wear makeup,’ Abbot said.

I let the strand slip and curl in my cupped hand. Could he possibly remember having heard his father make a comment like that? Henry said he loved my face naked; sometimes he would whisper, the way I like the rest of you. I looked so much older than I had two years ago. The word grief-stricken came to mind – as if grief could literally strike you and leave an indelible mark. I turned to Abbot. ‘Come here,’ I said. ‘Let’s have a look at you.’

I set the pearl necklace on the bedside table, folded down his collar, smoothed his hair, and put my hands on his bony shoulders. I looked at my son – his blue eyes, like his father’s, with the dark lashes. He had Henry’s tan skin and his ruddy cheeks, too, even though he was just a little boy. I loved his knobby chin and his two oversized adult teeth – so strangely set in his still-small mouth. ‘You look so handsome,’ I said. ‘Like a million bucks.’

‘Like a million-bucks ring bearer?’

‘Exactly,’ I said.

Abbot and I parked at the end of my sister’s winding gravel driveway, maneuvering around a multitude of vans – the caterer’s, the florist’s, the sound engineer’s. The driveway continued past the pool and the clay tennis court and faded to grass between the newly constructed studio and the old barn. Elysius was getting married to a sweet and diffident artist of national reputation named Daniel Welding, and even though they’d been living here together for eight years, I was always struck by the grandeur of the place she called home – and now it was even more breathtaking. The wedding itself was going to be held on the sloping lawn, which Abbot and I now marched up as quickly as we could. It was lined with rows of chairs strung together with sweeping tulle, and the exchange of vows was to take place next to the Japanese-inspired fountain where there was a trellis canopy, woven with flowers. They’d installed a temporary parquet dance floor under a large three-pronged white tent.

Abbot had his stuff in a canvas bag he got for free at the local library. I could see the cummerbund and clip-on bow tie shoved in there, among his snorkel gear – the tubing, the mask, and fins, which were gifts from my father. I was trying to pull my little suitcase on wheels. It bumped along behind me like an old obdurate dog.

We hurried to the studio to drop off our bags, but it was locked. Abbot cupped his hands to the glass and peered in. Daniel worked on massive canvases, and his detached studio had high ceilings, as well as a canvas stand that retracted into the floor. This way, he’s not teetering on ladders to get to the upper reaches. There was a sofa in the loft that pulled out into a double bed, where he sometimes took a rest midday and where Abbot and I would sleep that night. Daniel’s work sold incredibly well, which is why he could afford the house, the two driveways, the sloping lawn, the retractable canvas stand.

‘He’s in there!’ Abbot said.

‘He can’t be. It’s his wedding day.’

Abbot knocked, and Daniel appeared behind the glass door, opened it wide. He was broad-shouldered, always tan, his hair tinged silvery gray. He had a regal nose that sat a little arched and bulky on his face – an elegant face. He took off his glasses, tucked his chin to his chest in a way that made his chins fold up like a little accordion, and looked at me, messy but in a lovely dress, and Abbot, in his not-yet-garnished tux. He smiled broadly. ‘I’m so glad you’re here! How’s it hangin’, Abbot?’ He pulled Abbot to him, gave him a bear hug. That’s what Abbot needed, bear hugs, affection, from fatherly types. I was good at pecking foreheads, but I could tell how happy he was to be lifted up off his feet by Daniel. Abbot had a silly grin on his face now. Daniel hugged me, too. He smelt of expensive products – hair gels and imported soaps.

‘Are you allowed to be here?’ I asked. ‘You’re dressed like a wedding party escapee.’

Abbot slipped around Daniel and stepped into the studio as he always did – with an expression of awe. He loved the narrow stairs to the loft, the espresso machine, the exposed beams, and, of course, he loved the huge canvases in various stages of development propped against walls.

‘I had a little idea, so I popped in,’ Daniel said. ‘It calms me down to take a look.’

‘Shouldn’t you have shoes on?’ Abbot said.

‘Ah, yes.’ He pointed to a pair of shoes just a few feet away. ‘See, if I get paint on the suit, it’s one thing, but the shoes are handmade. A cobbler out in the desert had me stand in powder, barefoot, and from that imprint he made a pair of shoes specifically for my feet.’ These are the kinds of stories that he and Elysius had – a cobbler in the desert measuring bare feet in powder.

Abbot ran to the shoes, but didn’t touch them. I knew that he wanted to, but shoes tromp around on the ground and the ground is littered with germs. He would have had to scrub his hands in the bathroom immediately. The gesture of fake hand-washing wouldn’t do. ‘Where’s Charlotte?’ Abbot asked, returning to the paintings. Charlotte was Daniel’s daughter from his first marriage. Daniel had been through a nasty divorce and custody battle over Charlotte, and he swore he’d never marry again – not because he was jaded, but, more accurately, because he was beleaguered. A few months after Henry’s death, though, he had a change of heart. There was a natural correlation, of course – what could make you want to cement love more than the reminder of life’s fragility?

‘She’s up at the house,’ he said; then he turned to me and added, ‘trying to fly under the radar.’

‘How’s she doing?’ I asked. Charlotte was sixteen and going through a punk phase that alarmed Elysius, though punk was outdated. They had new terms for everything now.

‘She’s studying for the SATs, but, I don’t know, she seems a little … morose. Well, I worry about her. I’m her father. I worry. You know what I mean.’ He looked at me like a co-conspirator. He meant that I understood parenting from the inside out, in a way that Elysius didn’t. It was something he could never admit except in this sly way.

‘What’s this one supposed to be?’ Abbot asked. All of the paintings were abstract, chaotically so, but Abbot had stalled in front of an especially tumultuous one with big heavy lines, desperate and weighted. It was as if there were a bird trapped somewhere in the painting – a bird that wanted out.

Daniel looked at the painting. ‘A boat far off with full sails,’ he said. ‘And loss.’

‘You’ve got to cheer up!’ I said to Daniel quietly.

He put a hand on my shoulder. ‘You’re one to talk,’ he whispered. ‘Are you designing?’ I always felt honored that Daniel saw my work as a pastry chef as art. He wasn’t rarefied about art. He believed it belonged to all of us, and he always raved about my work. And, at this moment, he was speaking to me as an artist. ‘You’ve got to get back to creating. There’s no better way to mourn.’

I was surprised he put it so bluntly, but relieved, too. I was tired of sympathy. ‘I haven’t started up again, not yet,’ I said.

He nodded, solemnly.

‘Abbot,’ I called, ‘we’ve got to go.’

Disappointed, Abbot walked back to me. He said to Daniel, ‘Your paintings make people feel sad, but you don’t know why.’

‘A great definition of abstract art,’ Daniel said.

Abbot smiled and rubbed his hands together; then, as if noticing it himself, he shoved them in his pockets. Daniel took no notice, but I did. Abbot was learning to mask his problem. Was this a step backward or forward?

‘I’m late for mimosas,’ I said.

Daniel was looking at an unfinished canvas. He turned to me. ‘Heidi.’ He hesitated. ‘I’ve had to postpone the honeymoon for a few days to finish up work for a show. Elysius is in an uproar. When you see her, remind her I’m a nice person.’

‘I will,’ I said. ‘Can we leave these here?’ I asked, looking down at my suitcase and Abbot’s bag.

‘Of course,’ he said.

‘Come on, Abbot,’ I said, disentangling his tie and cummerbund from the snorkeling gear. Abbot ran to the door.

‘It really is good to see you two,’ Daniel said. ‘You, too,’ I said. ‘Happy almost wedding!’

Because Elysius and Daniel had been living here together for eight years, the wedding seemed like a strange afterthought. I considered Elysius and Daniel as not only having a marriage but having an enduring one. For my sister, however, the wedding was monumental, and now, walking past the lush lawn, the back-and-forth tracks of a wide riding mower pushing the grass in stripes, I felt guilty for being so removed.

I should have at least agreed to make her wedding cake. Once upon a time, I’d had a growing reputation as a high-end cake designer. People from all over Florida still call the Cake Shop for events a year or more in advance to reserve a spot. Weddings had been a specialty. But shortly after Henry’s death, I’d retreated to making the cupcakes and lemon squares in the early morning hours and working the counter. I’d sworn off brides – they were too overbearing, too wrapped up in the event. They struck me as ingrates, taking love for granted. Now I was embarrassed for not having offered to make Elysius and Daniel’s cake. It was my gift, the one small thing I had to give.

I looked up at the bank of windows, the kitchen and the dining room lit with a bright, golden hue, and stopped.

‘What is it?’ Abbot said.

I wanted to turn back and go home. Was I ready for this? It struck me this was how I felt in life now, like someone stalled on a lawn outside of a giant house who looked into beautiful windows where people were living their lives, filling flower vases, brushing their hair while looking in the mirror, laughing in quick flutters that would rise up and disappear. And here was my own sister’s life, brimming.

‘Nothing,’ I said to Abbot. I grabbed his hand and gave it a squeeze. He squeezed back and just like that he took a step ahead of me and pulled me toward the house – full of the living.

At that moment, the back door flung wide, and my mother emerged. Her hair was a honeyed confection swooped up in her signature chignon, and her face was glazed in a way that made her look ‘dewy and young,’ which she attributed to a line of expensive lotions. My mother was aging beautifully. She had a long, elegant neck, full lips, arched eyebrows. It’s a strange thing to be raised by someone much more beautiful than you’ll ever be. She had a regal beauty, but, set against this posture of royalty, her vulnerability seemed more pronounced – a certain weary softness in her expressions.

Her eyes fell on me and Abbot there on the lawn. ‘I’ve just been sent out to find you!’

My sister sent my mother to find me? This was bad. Very bad.

‘How late are we?’ I asked.

‘You mean, how angry is your sister?’

‘Have I missed the mini toasts?’ I asked, hoping I had.

My mother didn’t answer. She bustled across the deck and down the small set of stairs. Her toffee-colored dress swished around her. It was a sleek design that showed off her collarbones. My mother is half French, and she believes in elegance.

‘I needed to get out of that house!’ she said. ‘And you were my excuse. Direct orders to find you and get you moving.’ She looked agitated, maybe even a little teary. Had she been crying? My mother is a woman of deep emotion, but not one to cry easily. She’s the definition of the term active senior – she puts on a show of busyness meant to imply satisfaction but has always given me the impression of a woman about to burst. Once upon a time, she did burst and disappeared for the summer, but then she came back to us. Still, once a mother’s taken off without you – even if she was right to do so – you spend the rest of your life wondering if she may do it again. She turned her attention to Abbot. ‘Aren’t you a beautiful boy?’

He blushed. My mother had this effect on everyone – the mail carrier harried at the holidays, the pilot who steps out to say bye-bye at the end of a flight, even a snotty maître d’.

‘And you?’ she said, brushing my hair back over one shoulder. ‘Where are the pearls?’

‘I still need a few finishing touches,’ I said. ‘How is Elysius doing?’

‘She’ll forgive you,’ my mother said softly. My mother knew that this might be hard for me – one daughter was gaining a husband, one had lost one – and so she was trying to tread carefully.

‘I’m so sorry we’re late,’ I said guiltily. ‘I lost track of time. Abbot and I were …’

‘Busy writing the speech for Auntie Elysius,’ Abbot said. ‘I was helping!’ He looked guilty, too – my co-conspirator.

My mother shook her head. Her eyes filled with tears. ‘I’m such a mess!’ she said, trying to smooth the ripples from her dress and then laughing strangely. ‘I don’t know why I’m responding like this!’ She pinched her nose as if to stop herself from crying.

‘Responding to what?’ I asked, surprised by her sudden emotion. ‘The wedding? Weddings are crazy. They bring up a lot of—’

‘It’s not the wedding,’ my mother said. ‘It’s the house. Our house … in Provence – there’s been a fire.’

My sister and I went to the house

My sister and I went to the house in Provence with my mother when we were children – short summer stints every year that my father, a workaholic, was too busy to join. Then one summer my mother went alone, and we never went back. As my mother started to cry, there on my sister’s lawn, she wrapped her arms around me, letting me hold her up for a moment, and I remembered the house the way children remember things, from odd angles, a collection of strange details: that there were no screens on the windows, that the small interior doors had persnickety knobs that seemed to latch and unlatch of their own will, that along the garden paths surrounding the house, I thought there were white blooms clustered on the tall weeds, but when I leant in close, I could see they were tiny snails, their white shells imprinted with delicate swirls.

The house and everything in it seemed virtually timeless, or maybe it would be more accurate to say that it was time-full – time layered upon time. I remembered the kitchen, which housed the dining room table, long and narrow, surrounded by mismatched chairs – each a survivor from a different era. The small, shallow kitchen sink was made of one solid slab of marble, brown and speckled like an egg. It was original to the house, which had been built in the eighteenth century, just past the edge of a small vineyard. In the yard, there was a fountain erected during the 1920s that fluttered with bright orange, bloated koi and was surrounded by wrought-iron lawn chairs, and a small table covered in a white, wind-kicked tablecloth. The house – fifteen minutes from Aix-en-Provence, nestled in the shadow of the long ridged back of Mont Sainte-Victoire – had belonged to my mother since her parents died, when she was in her mid-twenties.

There, my mother fed us stories about the house itself – love stories, mostly, improbable ones that I’d always wanted to believe but was suspicious of even as a child. But still I clung to them. After she told us the stories at night, I would retell them to myself. I whispered them into my cupped hands, feeling the warmth of my breath, as if I could hold the stories there and keep them.

I could still picture the three of us in one of the upstairs bedrooms, my mother sitting on the edge of one of our beds or moving to the window, where she leant out into the cool night. Elysius and I would let our hair, damp from a bath, create the impressions of wet halos on our white pillows.

The cicadas were always clamoring, always ratcheting up then fading then ratcheting up again.

‘In the beginning,’ my mother would start, because the first story marked the birth of the house itself, as if the family didn’t exist before the house was arranged from stone – and she would tell the story of one of our ancestors, a young man who had asked a woman to marry him. He was in love, and it was a great love. But the woman declined. Her family wouldn’t allow it; they didn’t think he was worthy. So the young man built the house, stone by stone, all alone, night and day, sleepless for one year. He was fevered by love. He couldn’t stop. He gave her the house as a gift – and she fell so deeply in love with the house and the man that she disobeyed her family and married him. He was weak and sick from having built the house in such a frenzy of love, and so she tended to him for their first newlywed year, bringing him back to life with bowls of pistou and bread and wine. They lived to a hundred. The husband died and the wife, heartbroken, followed within a week.

The house was built as an act of love. That’s what we were supposed to understand. A portentous story, no? It was a little weighty for two girls to take to heart. But there were more like it.

My great-grandparents owned a small shoe shop in Paris and were incapable of having children. My great-grandmother was called back to the house one winter to care for an old-maid auntie. But they were so in love, he couldn’t stand to be apart from her. One night he showed up on the doorstep, and he stayed for a week. Every night they heard the ghostly chatter of cicadas – who shouldn’t make any noise in winter. They conceived a child there – and went on to have six more.

And so we were told that the house could make love manifest. It was capable of performing miracles.

Their oldest daughter, my grandmother, was a young woman in Paris during the celebrations at the end of World War II. She was stubborn, brash. She met a young American GI in the crowds around Place de l’Opéra. He kissed her passionately, and then the crowds shifted like tides. They got separated. They searched for each other, but they were both lost in the mad swirl. After the war, he made his way back to France, and through a series of more small miracles, found her in this house, far from where they’d met. And they made a vow never to be apart again.

The house had the power to seal two love-struck souls together forever. We loved the stories, even as we were outgrowing them. We passed the stories between us like two girls playing Cat’s Cradle, handing off the intricate patterns from one set of hands to the other and back again. When Elysius’s interest was fading, I would force her to ruminate on motives, what each person must have looked like. We invented details, elaborated, made the stories longer and more complex.

Leading up to our last trip the summer when I was thirteen, however, Elysius and I started to poke holes in the stories. ‘What was the series of small miracles?’ My mother didn’t know. ‘There are medical reasons why someone can’t have a baby for a time and then can again, aren’t there?’ The answer was yes, but still … And of course it’s not physically possible for a man to build a house of stone, by hand, alone, forgoing sleep and proper nourishment.

‘Yes,’ my mother said. ‘But that’s what makes it an act of pure love.’

Years later, my sister would be converted. This was the place where Daniel, after eight years together and his solemn vow not to remarry, would propose to her while she was soaking in the bathtub.

And I was almost swayed into believing once. One day during our final trip together, the three of us were in one of the upstairs bedrooms, folding and sorting clothes that had dried on the wooden rack. This was my sister’s room and the windows faced the mountain. I don’t know who saw it first, but soon the three of us were collected at the window, watching an outdoor wedding on the mountain. The bride was wearing a long white gown, and her veil blew around in the breeze. We had a pair of binoculars for birdwatching. My sister grabbed them off the shelf and we took turns looking at the scene.

Finally, my mother said, ‘Let’s get a closer view.’

And so the three of us ran down the narrow stone stairs, through the kitchen, and out the back of the house. The wedding party was fairly high up the mountain so we walked down rows in the vineyard, passing the binoculars back and forth. I remembered adjusting the binoculars each time to fit my small face, and the view through the smeared lens, blurry, surreal, and beautiful. The bride started crying. She cupped her face in her hands, and when she pulled her hands away, she was laughing.

And suddenly my mother, my sister, and I found ourselves in a swarm of butterflies – Bath whites, to be exact, white with black spotted markings on their wings. Elysius looked them up in a book at a small bookstore in Aix-en-Provence later during our stay. They fluttered around us madly, like a dizzy cloud of white.

I could see only snippets of my mother’s bright pink skirt and dark hair. Her white blouse was lost in the white butterflies. And so her voice seemed almost unattached to her body.

‘Are butterflies supposed to swarm like this?’ I asked.

‘No,’ my mother said, and she told us that it was another enchantment.

We argued with her because we felt it was our role, but I believed in the Bath whites, and I knew, secretly, that Elysius did, too.

That’s the summer I’ve remembered most vividly. I was full of longing in that way that thirteen-year-old girls can long seemingly endlessly because their longing lacks direction. I wanted to be enchanted. I longed for the brothers who lived in the big house next to ours. The older one knew how to balance things on his forehead – sizable things like wooden chairs and rakes – and the younger one would sulk when his brother got attention, and splashed me mercilessly in the pool, which was more green than blue. They had dark hair and eyes. They smiled sheepishly. They were the exotics, the boys I would have dated if my grandmother had kept my grandfather in France, refusing to give up her home, her country, her language. I imagined that they would understand me in a way American boys didn’t.

I stole a photo of the two of them – the older boy, Pascal, balancing a pogo stick on his forehead, tall and handsome, already muscled, while the younger brother, Julien, watched disdainfully from a lawn chair. I’d kind of fallen in love with the older boy, the one who’d really been trying to get Elysius’s attention. And I kind of hated the one in the lawn chair – the sulker and splasher. I folded the picture up and put it in a zippered pencil pouch in my desk drawer.

In the years that followed, though, I mainly remembered my mother, who was strangely distant on that trip – wistful, quiet – as if she knew, in some way, what might be coming. Maybe her relationship with my father was already fractured – it seemed so to me, and I didn’t know anything about marriage.

The next summer, when I was fourteen and Elysius was seventeen, my mother went to the house without us. She disappeared not for a short stint, but for the entire summer – after the discovery of my father’s affair, something that my mother was frank about, in a typically French manner. She sent my sister and me letters on tissue-thin airmail stationery, as frail as sewing patterns. I wrote her back, every time, on the pink monogrammed stationery she’d gotten me for Christmas, but never sent the letters. I hid them in my desk. That was the summer of 1989. The last day of August, she called to tell us she was coming home.

Once home, she began making the small pastries she’d fallen in love with while in France – tarte au citron, flan, tiramisu, crème brûlée, pear pinwheels. She never opened a single cookbook. She seemed instead to be working from memory. She’d never been much of a baker before that, but after her trip she seemed to pour herself into the small, delicate desserts. I wanted to be with her, and so I lingered in the kitchen. Maybe this was where I first learnt to equate the ephemeral art of baking with abstract things like longing – although, for many years, I’d prefer to call it art, and only until after meeting Henry would I think of it as an act of love. My mother and I sat at the table in the breakfast nook and we tasted cakes – critiquing them quietly in hushed, reverent tones. After a while, she would proclaim that we would never get this one just right. She would claim to give up baking for a day or two, but then she would be back in the kitchen and we would move on to the next dessert.

My mother was quiet and pensive, and a week or so after her return, the last of her letters arrived. It told the story of how the entire mountain had caught fire. The flames came all the way to the back stone steps of the house, but that was where the fire stopped. A miracle, she called it. As fond as she was of proclaiming miracles, this one seemed true. But when we asked her to describe the fire, she didn’t want to discuss it. ‘I wrote it down so you can keep the story forever,’ she told us. It was strange that she wouldn’t tell us, but I didn’t pester her. We were lucky she was home. She was fragile, and, moreover, she’d proved that she could be run off. I let it be.

One day she stopped baking. She said that we’d tried all the pastries and gotten them all wrong. There was no need for more. After she made the announcement, she seemed less restless, more peaceful, and so I took this as a good thing.

But I kept baking, alone, at first in a clumsy attempt to lure her back into the kitchen to spend time with me, and then simply to be lost in the world I’d found there.

All those years later, I would catch myself pinching dough in a specific way or smelling an exact scent that brought me back to myself as a young woman alone in our kitchen, and I would wonder where the picture of the brothers had gone. Where were my mother’s letters now? Where were the letters I wrote back on pink stationery and never sent? Thrown out. Buried away. Lost like everything else.

My mother had led us inside

My mother had led us inside the house and we were now standing in the kitchen. Elysius’s kitchen was restaurant grade, stainless steel and marble, with elegant lighting, kept pristine because she barely ever uses it. Her refrigerator was reliably stocked with things like baby carrots, yogurt, and healthy organic sprout salad takeout boxes, alongside exotic things like certain types of fish flown in from far-off islands, edible flowers, and bulbous roots that, I swear, were black market and vaguely illegal. In general, though, the inside of her fridge lacked color and density. It was airy, had a little echo to it, a lot of white staring back at you.

Now the kitchen was bustling with caterers. A woman in a blue cocktail dress was giving orders. She glanced at her BlackBerry and whisked out onto the deck to take a call.

There were tureens with ladles, long trays stacked with frothy appetizers, towers of shrimp, mussels, and clams, cases of wine, rows of stemware.

My mother was trying to explain to Abbot, once again, that no one had been hurt in the fire, that it was very far away in France. ‘It was only a kitchen fire. We don’t know how much damage, but everyone is OK!’

Abbot was rubbing his hands together in unrelenting worry. ‘How far away was the fire? Where’s France?’ he asked, and she started explaining all over again.

But I wasn’t listening. I felt unmoored. The news of the house fire seemed to have jarred something loose. Suddenly there were the memories of the house from my childhood, and once they flooded in, there was no stopping my brain. I’d taught myself how not to linger on memories of Henry, but Henry was here, and now I couldn’t resist. I felt unable to stop the image of him – vivid and real – from appearing in my mind. It was like being pulled under by a great tide. Henry and I had been introduced in a kitchen filled with caterers, after all.

Henry Bartolozzi at twenty-four, standing in a kitchen, just before he met me. He was wearing a pair of nicely creased pants, a sport coat, and Nikes. He had black hair, combed but still curly, and light blue eyes. We were both in culinary school at the same time, and we’d both been invited – through friends of friends – to the house of a prominent chef in town. My mother had warned me not to fall in love with a creative type. By this point, Elysius had been living in New York for a few years as a struggling painter and had dated too many starving artists. My mother was sick of them. ‘What’s wrong with a med student?’ she would say at family dinners. ‘What if someone chokes? I’d like at least one person here to be able to do a solid Heimlich, someone who can fashion a breathing tube from a Bic pen in an emergency. Do you want one of us to fall on a knife and bleed to death?’

I thought the advice was pretty good. I was sick of my sister’s boyfriends, too. Plus, I wasn’t going to culinary school in order to meet men. I was tired of men. I was pretty sure I’d ruined my share. In fact, at this point, I’d recently ruined someone’s career at NASA by talking them into getting stoned, broken up someone else’s engagement, and been blamed for a sizable Jet Ski accident – no fatalities. I was afraid of men for the same reason I was afraid of frogs – because I couldn’t predict which way they would jump.

In general, I saw love as entering into an agreement that depended on your willingness to compromise. This was rooted in my parents’ complicated marriage, of course. The story goes that my father, an attorney for the US Patent Office, saved my mother from the typing pool.

Problematic, on a feminist level, for many reasons, it was made worse because of one of our family secrets: my mother was brilliant. Her father came back from the war and opened a five and dime, which supported the family for years but was struggling by the time she reached college age and, to compound matters, her father’s health started to fail, and so college was completely out of the question. As a housewife, my mother watched all of the latest movies, even the foreign films, which she went to alone because my father refused to read subtitles. She referenced films by the names of their directors, a distinctly French trait. She gardened scientifically and read books on physics, history, philosophy, religion, but rarely mentioned these things. She led a quiet, secretive life of the mind. One Christmas, someone gave us the game of Trivial Pursuit. My mother knew all of the answers. We were startled. ‘How do you know all this stuff?’ we kept asking. After the game was over and she won, she put the lid back on the box and never played again. Had my mother needed saving? She accepted the story that, indeed, she had. It was no wonder then that when I met Henry in the kitchen of that party all those years ago, I saw love as compromise, even weakness.

Henry was the first person I met at the party. He was talking to the chef’s daughter – a towheaded third grader. He had a smile that hitched up on one side, a smile I immediately loved.

He introduced himself. Henry Bartolozzi. The two names didn’t seem to fit together and I said something about it. He explained that Henry was his mother’s choice, the namesake of her grandfather, an old Southerner, and his last name was from his father’s Italian side.

I told him my last name. ‘Buckley. A hard name to cart through middle school. I was a walking limerick.’

He tapped his chin. ‘Does Buckley rhyme with something? Funny. I can’t think of anything.’ Then he confessed that Fartolozzi hadn’t helped his middle school rep any. Raised in the Italian section of Boston – North End – he had an accent that was New England with a bounce, as if inspired partly by Fenway, partly by opera.

I remembered that night, after the party spilt out onto the lawn, the towhead and her older brother lighting firecrackers that skittered across the pavement. It was dark. It was hard to tell if Henry was glancing at me or not.

Later a lot of people piled into his old, rusty Honda, and when the radio accidentally hit an easy listening station, I started belting out ‘Brandy.’ I confessed that I was this kind of unfortunate drunk, an easy listening diva. Despite this, or maybe because of it, Henry asked for my phone number.

The very next night, a new friend of mine from school named Quinn invited me to dinner. I claimed I already had too much work. Quinn said, ‘OK, it’ll just be me and Henry then.’ And I said, ‘Henry Bartolozzi?’ I told her I could change my plans.

Henry brought bottles of a great Italian wine – a splurge; none of us had any money. Because I wasn’t used to the low futon masquerading as a couch, I kept dousing myself with wine each time I sat down. By the end of the night, I smelt like a winery.

My main mode of transportation was an enormous 1950s-era bicycle – bought at a Goodwill. Henry offered to drive me home – it had gotten chilly. I declined, but he insisted. He stuffed the monstrosity into the trunk of his ancient uninsured Honda, but then the car didn’t start. At all. This was a relief. If he was trying to save me, it helped that he was failing.

I said, ‘I know what’s wrong with your car.’

His blue eyes lit up. ‘You know engines?’

I nodded. ‘The problem’s simple. When you turn the key, it doesn’t make any noise.’

Henry found this charming. I found it charming that he found it charming. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It’s probably the sound-effects alternator.’

Henry walked me home – about six blocks. When we got to my house, I realized I’d left my keys at the dinner party. He walked me back to Quinn’s, and then to my place again. At this point it was three o’clock in the morning. We’d walked and talked a good chunk of the night away. Now, back on my front stoop, we lingered.

He said, ‘So, do you like me?’ He tilted his head, his dark lashes framing his blue eyes. He had full lips and the smile appeared again – just a half smile really, just that one side.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘Of course I like you. You’re very nice.’

‘Yes, but by the sixth-grade definition. Do you likeme like me or do you only like me?’

‘I might like you like you,’ I said, looking at my shoes and then back at him. ‘Might. I don’t have good luck with men. In fact, I’ve sworn them off.’

‘Really?’ This is the part I remember so clearly – how close he was, so close I could feel the warmth of his breath. ‘Can I ask why?’

‘Men are work. They think they’re going to swoop in and save you, but then they take effort. They need cajoling. They’re kind of, by and large, like talking sofas.’

‘For a talking sofa, I feel like I’ve got a really strong vocabulary.’ He whispered this, as if it were a confession. ‘I did well on standardized tests – when compared to other talking sofas.’ And then he really stared at me. I was falling in love with his shoulders. I could see his collarbones, the vulnerable dip between them, his beautiful, strong jaw. ‘I think swearing off men is old-fashioned.’

‘It’s kind of an antiquated notion. I might have been drunk when I said it.’

‘Maybe you were on a bender?’ He smiled his half smile. ‘Taking a break from belting out “Brandy”?’

‘Probably. And now in the sober light of day, I can see what a bad idea that was – like trying to put on a full-scale production of West Side Story in your local 7-Eleven.’

He was impossibly close now. ‘Have you ever tried to put on a full-scale production of West Side Story at a 7-Eleven?’

‘Twice. It didn’t work,’ I said. ‘I’m over it now, swearing off men, that is.’

‘You’ve officially de-sworn-off men,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You sure?’

I nodded, but I wasn’t sure.

And he kissed me – softly at first, almost just a tug on my mouth, but then I gave in. He held my face in his hands. He pressed his body against mine, against the door. I dropped my keys. We kissed and kissed, a moment that in my memory feels infinite.

The kiss, that was the beginning. Henry and I worked as a couple because he convinced me that I was wrong about love. Love isn’t about compromise. Life is hard. Life demands compromise. But when two people fall in love, they create a sanctuary. My family was fragile. Love was something made of handblown glass. But Henry had been raised so differently. His family was loud, rowdy, bawdy, quick to anger, quick to forgive, with food everywhere – Southern food mixed with Italian set to the mantra of Mangia! Mangia! – always frying, bubbling, spattering, the kitchen pumping like a steamy heart.

On one level, I didn’t expect to fall in love. I saw this other future version of myself, a tough, independent woman, bullying my way through life. But, honestly, I also felt like Henry was the exact person I’d been waiting for – the soulI’d been waiting for – and the package he came in was like unwrapping gift after gift. And this is what you look like. And this is what your voice sounds like. And this is the set of your childhood memories. I’d thought I’d been looking but really I’d been just waiting for him without knowing that I was waiting, really, without knowing that I’d been missing him before he arrived. I thought he was the answer to the longing I’d felt at thirteen. I thought the ache was a restless lonesomeness, but it was more like homesickness for a place you haven’t yet come to.

In my sister’s kitchen, I was remembering our first kiss, the feeling of being pressed up against the door, the sound of the keys as they fell from my hand, jangling, and hit the cement stoop. There were so many hours, days, weeks that blurred from one moment to the next and slipped by. I wasn’t good at the daily. I was lousy at cherishing the moment. It turned out that my longing was part of who I was. It had subsided, but then – especially the year before Henry’s death – it returned. It got in the way of my ability to appreciate the details of my daily life. That’s what Henry did so well while I longed. How could I have been so careless?

Why didn’t I pay closer attention?

I was homesick in my sister’s kitchen, on her wedding day. I wanted to go home, but the home I longed for, with Henry, was no longer there.

‘Let’s get your father and Abbot together. They can keep each other busy until the wedding starts,’ my mother said loudly over the kitchen noise. She’d managed not to smear her makeup while crying; it was one of her skills.

She pointed to my father, who was wearing a navy suit and sitting in the corner of the breakfast nook, penciling numbers into a book of Sudoku. This was how the ex-workaholic now handled the passage of time. Sudoku was a point of contention between my parents, and my father had to do it on the sly. Sudoku was a putterer’s thing to do, and my mother hated puttering. But my father was drawn to detail work, the intricacies that he’d found fulfilling as a patent lawyer. He liked categories within subcategories within subcategories. He talked a good game about his adoration of invention, but truth be told, he enjoyed rejecting claims for ‘indefinite language.’ Deep down, I think my father had wanted to be an inventor, but he ended up a legalistic grammarian, a keeper of language.

Abbot looked at me mournfully. He loved his grandfather, but he didn’t want to be abandoned in the noisy traffic of the kitchen. Plus, there was something inherently demeaning about being pawned off, and he knew he was being pawned off.

‘You two are buddies,’ I reminded him. ‘You’ll keep each other entertained.’

We walked over and my father looked up from his Sudoku. ‘Well, don’t you two shine up nice?’ he said. ‘How do, Abbot?’ How do was one of Abbot’s baby expressions. He’d been a very social baby, asking everyone all day long how they were doing – baggers, bank tellers, librarians. How do? How do?

‘I’m good!’ Abbot said, putting on a happy face.

‘Maybe you two can watch a television show in the den,’ my mother said.

My father glanced at her, gauging her emotion. I assumed he could tell she’d been crying. ‘Sounds good! Let’s get out of the way of all this pomp and circumstance.’

‘There’s a Red Sox game on,’ I said. Henry had been such a die-hard Red Sox fan that it was Abbot’s legacy, nearly genetic, and now it was my sole responsibility to make sure that he got hooked. I’d bought him all kinds of paraphernalia – ball caps, T-shirts, a pennant pinned to his door, curling in on itself like a dying corsage, as if even the Red Sox pennants needed New England’s chill and this one was wilting in Tallahassee’s humidity.

‘There’s also a show on whales today,’ Abbot said. ‘Whales have retractable nipples. They’re mammals, like us.’

‘Baseball players are mammals, too!’ my dad said.

‘But they don’t have retractable nipples,’ Abbot explained, undeterred.

‘They don’t,’ I admitted. Abbot is a very smart kid, and in the world of kid-logic, he’d won this argument. ‘Whales,’ I said. ‘Blubber it is!’

‘Bring on the blubber!’ my father said.

My mother turned away from us. ‘I hear your sister calling,’ she said. I could, too, a shrill voice coming from the upper reaches of the house. She started marching toward the stairs then called to me over her shoulder. ‘Don’t dawdle!’

My father reached out and touched my arm. He lowered his voice. ‘She told you about the fire, no doubt. She’s upset. You know how crazy your mother is about that place.’ He’d never been to that place, not once. The house had become a point of contention between my parents – at first because my father was always too busy to go and later because it represented my mother’s abandonment of us after my father’s affair. ‘It turns out the woman in charge over there fell and broke something.’

‘She told me, but she didn’t mention Véronique,’ I said. Véronique’s house stood about two hundred feet from ours and had also been in the family for generations. Over scattered summers of my mother’s childhood, she and Véronique had grown up together. My mother didn’t have siblings and Véronique had only brothers, and so they’d said that they were like sisters. A few years after Véronique’s divorce and after we’d stopped visiting, she’d renovated her larger house, turning it into a bed and breakfast. In return for minimal upkeep, she used my mother’s house for overflow during the summer months. This was the arrangement that had stuck and was still in place. ‘What did she break? Did it have to do with the fire?’

‘I don’t know the details,’ my father said. ‘Your mother’s being emotional. I just warn you. She’s more hyped up than usual.’ Hyped up, that was the expression my father used to describe what I saw as my mother’s restless longing for something else. For what, I don’t know. I knew only my own longing, the kind I’d likely inherited from her. I knew the shape it took now – I longed for Henry, for him to come back to life.

My father’s affair didn’t strike me as being filled with this kind of longing. I’ve always assumed that he stumbled into the affair, that it happened the way pilots are taught a plane crash happens. It’s never just one thing but a number of contributing factors at once – ice on the wings, coupled with an electrical issue and some clouds … Or maybe it was, more simply, a midlife crisis. He’d saved my mother from the typing pool, and here was his chance to relive