The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted

by Bridget Asher

  Elysius looked at Charlotte. She stood up, too, and said, “I have a baby already. It might not be something that anyone else really gets, but your father is my baby. I’m protecting and caring for and tending to an artist. And that’s why I haven’t done a good job of raising you, Charlotte. I’m raising him.”

  Charlotte nodded. I figured that this made sense to her, although it was hard to hear. It was the truth. It probably put words to a hunch she’d had for years.

  “Heidi would do a better job. Her house would be a home. And I’m sorry about what I said earlier, about trying to bring back the dead.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  Elysius looked at my mother. “Is that what’s supposed to happen here?” she asked.

  My mother looked at Véronique.

  “C’est clair?” Véronique said.

  My mother translated. “Does it feel clear to you? Really clear?”

  Elysius put her hands on her hips and took a deep breath, then let it out. “Yep.”

  “Then, yes,” my mother said. “That’s what’s supposed to happen.”

  “So, it’s okay with you still, Charlotte?” I asked. “To come live with Abbot and me?”

  Charlotte smiled. “I know it’s going to be hard. It’s a lot to ask of you and Abbot. I mean, it’s more than okay with me.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  “Me, too,” Elysius said, and then she added, matter-of-factly, “Can I go to bed now? I’m spent.”

  “Yeah,” Charlotte said. “Can I go to bed?”

  My mother was staring at the mountain again. Véronique nodded. My mother gave permission with a flick of her hand, once again a matriarch.

  “Abbot needs to go to bed, too,” I said, pointing to his head on my stomach.

  “I’ll bring him with me,” Charlotte said.

  I jiggled Abbot’s shoulder and whispered his name. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. Charlotte lent him a hand and I boosted his butt, and he was on his feet, limping sleepily to the house. On the way, I heard Charlotte say, “Uncle Abbot. Do you like that or do you prefer the full proper term, Uncle Absterizer?”

  thought about getting up and following Charlotte and Abbot inside. I’d gotten an answer of some kind. Wasn’t I learning to feel, connect, let decisions form? I turned over onto my stomach, propped on my elbows, and looked back at the Dumonteils’ house, which was dark. And then I turned and looked at my mother and Véronique. I said, “The box.”

  My mother looked at Véronique and then bent down and picked up a canvas bag with two hefty straps, which was sitting next to her chair. She put her hand inside and pulled out the box itself. “This box?”

  “You found it.”

  “Yes,” she said, “on my bedside table. It was like it had been waiting for me, patiently, all these years. Or was it, perhaps, you?”

  “I might have had a hand in it,” I said. “Did you look inside?”

  “No,” she said. “I know what’s inside.”

  “The box is for you, Heidi,” Véronique said. “It is your gift. She hid it all these years.”

  “My gift?”

  My mother handed the box to me. “Open it,” she said.

  I took the box from her, unclasped the small latch, and opened it. Inside, there were papers, folded into thirds, pink papers and also white pieces of notepaper. I picked up a piece of pink paper, unfolded it, and there was my monogram in fancy script on the top—the stationery of my childhood. It was one of the letters that I’d written my mother that lost summer, and beneath that, there was another and another.

  “But I never mailed these,” I said.

  “Your father found them and he sent them all to me in one big envelope.”

  “These were private,” I said.

  “He was desperate,” my mother said. “He would have tried anything.”

  “But I thought you told me that the box was filled with love letters,” I said to Véronique.

  “These are love letters,” she said.

  I sifted through the box and pulled out one of the white pages. It was a recipe written in French in a messy scrawl. The paper was dotted with oil that made some spots translucent. Tarte Citron was written at the top, underlined twice. It wasn’t my mother’s handwriting.

  “Who wrote these?” I asked.

  “That is what I was leaving behind. It was hard to leave, and that autumn, I tried to make all of his desserts. But none of them worked. Nothing tasted the same. I gave up.”

  “He was a pastry chef?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “Did you love him?” I asked.

  “I loved him with all of my heart,” my mother said.

  “But you came home.”

  “Your father would have survived. Perhaps, over time, he’d have thrived. And Elysius didn’t need me as much as you did, or not in the ways that I could really recognize at the time. While I was gone, it was like she learned how to take care of herself. She grew up. She came into her own. But you,” she said, “you were still so young. You needed me.”

  “But you really loved him,” I said. “Maybe we could have made it work. Kids are resilient; that’s what people say, right?”

  “The doors of your heart were open,” Véronique said. “Read the letters.”

  “You would have come home, too, Heidi, if you were me,” my mother said. “Your love was stronger than anything in the world.”

  “It was strong enough to light a mountain on fire!” Véronique said.

  “Read the letters,” my mother said. “You knew a lot about love.”

  “It is interesting that this stranger, this man your mother loved, he passed to you the art of baking,” Véronique said, “the idea that sweet food is love and love is sweet food, to your mother, and she passed it to you. And that is where it found a home—inside of you.”

  “Why did you hide the box here?” I asked my mother.

  “I filled the box with the love I left behind and the reason why I went home, which was you,” she said, “the love I was returning to. That was my love story, the one that the house gave to me. It just seemed like the box belonged here.”

  “Oh,” I said. We were quiet a moment, and then my mind was trying to sort things out. “If you hadn’t fallen in love with this man, and if I hadn’t written you the letters and if Dad hadn’t sent them out of desperation, then you wouldn’t have come home and started baking, and I wouldn’t have followed you around the kitchen that fall, and I wouldn’t have fallen in love with baking, and I wouldn’t have gone to culinary school, and I wouldn’t have met Henry.”

  “I never thought of it that way exactly,” my mother said. “But that’s true.”

  “But you could have had a life here, a different life,” I said.

  “I don’t regret it, Heidi,” my mother said. “Not for a heartbeat.”

  The small, charred box balanced on my knees, I took a deep breath and looked at the mountain.

  “Did watching the mountain give you answers, Heidi?” Véronique asked.

  “Yes,” I said, “I’m falling in love with your son, the one without the pogo stick.”

  read the letters that I wrote my mother that lost summer. Everything I wrote, in my thirteen-year-old’s handwriting, was simple, beautiful, honest. Come home. Come home. Come home, I wrote. If you don’t, I still won’t stop loving you. My love can go on forever and ever.

  When I folded the letters in with the recipes and closed the charred box with its small latch, I thought, What if the things I’ve wondered about love all have some truth to them?

  Love is infinite. Grief can lead to love. Love can lead to grief. Grief is a love story told backward just as love is a grief story told backward. Every good love story has many loves hiding within it.

  Maybe I should put it this way. Imagine a snow globe.

  Imagine a tiny snow-struck house inside of it. But this time the woman stands at the window, and there are no screens. She cranks the window wide open.


  And it is not a snow-struck house. The snow isn’t snow at all.

  It never was.

  The snow is really Bath whites—their white wings with black dots—a beautiful storm of them.

  And the house isn’t a quiet house. It’s full of voices, talking, laughing, calling to one another above the sound of the radio. Her lover’s voice is there. Her son’s voice. Somewhere in an upper bedroom a baby wakes up and gives a cry. A young mother’s feet hit the stairs and quickly climb.

  This time, the woman isn’t alone, not at all.

  The snow-that-isn’t-snow-but-instead-is-Bath-whites reminds her of her husband as a little boy riding his bike on a country road filled with bounding, massive white Pyrenees, an avalanche of their howling, leaping joy. And the thought of her husband as a boy reminds her of her son and her son reminds her of her husband, and she lets the Bath whites flutter into the house until it fills with the blur of wings.

  decided to circle away and then come back.

  I called Julien’s cell phone but wasn’t surprised when it went straight to voice mail. I’d never seen him answer his phone in my presence. He wasn’t the type. Véronique told me that he’d gone to Marseille. I remembered that he’d done the same after his split with Patricia; he’d gone to Marseille, too, to stay with Gerard, the flirtatious bachelor. “Is he at Gerard’s?” I asked Véronique.

  “I don’t know for certain,” she said, but she wrote Gerard’s address on a piece of paper and gave it to me.

  My mother told me that she would watch over Abbot in case he woke up in the night and asked for me. “He’ll be fine, though. Don’t worry. Just go.”

  Marseille was only about an hour or so away, and I was soon in my rental car, driving out of the narrow, winding roads lined with shrill cicadas and out on the highway. I didn’t listen to the radio. I just drove in silence, hoping to still feel the force of the mountain, holding tight to my answers, hoping for resolve to settle in.

  I took an exit for Marseille and, using one of Véronique’s old maps, found Gerard’s apartment building. I parked in a spot up the street. It was a cool night, a little overcast, with the promise of rain. There was still a good bit of traffic. The city was bustling even though it was late. It was a port town, after all. It was always busy. I slipped into the building’s front lobby, and, from a bank of buzzers, I found only one labeled with Gerard as a first name, luckily. I hadn’t ever asked for his last name. I buzzed and he buzzed back, without even asking who it was. I took the stairs up to the third floor. The door at the end of the hall was opened a crack.

  As I got closer, I said, “Allô? Bonjour?”

  The door swung wide and there was a man—gangly and tall with short wet hair, freckled, and naked except for a towel wrapped around his waist. He was talking on a cell phone and digging through a wallet.

  “Excusez-moi,” I said. “Je cherche pour Julien Dumontiel?”

  He looked up, shut his wallet, pulled the phone from his ear and said, “Heidi?”

  “Yes. Gerard?”

  “I thought you were the man coming with my Chinese food,” he said in English. He smiled at me and hung up the phone without a word to the person on the line. Was it a friend? His mother? “Do you want to stay for dinner?”

  “I’m really looking for Julien,” I said. “Is he here?”

  “You have made the man very sad,” he said. “He was here, but now he is not.”

  “Where did he go?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “He is a man without reason.”

  “You don’t know where he went?”

  “Stay for dinner. I will dress myself,” Gerard said with an embarrassed smile. “The Chinese food will arrive. Maybe Julien will return.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “It’s a sweet offer, but I’ll have to pass.” I turned and headed back to the stairs.

  “Heidi!” Gerard shouted.

  “Yes?”

  “I hope you come with goodness. He needs goodness.”

  I nodded and ran down the stairs quickly. I opened the door to the apartment building and stood, breathless, on the sidewalk. A young woman walked swiftly by with a little dog on a leash in tow. The dog looked at me and pattered on. I looked up at the sky, and in the distance, I saw the shine of a cathedral. Was it Notre-Dame de la Garde, the cathedral that Julien had talked about? It sat on top of a hill; its bell tower, crowned with a golden statue, was nearly lost in the cloudy sky.

  I decided to drive toward it, but while I circled winding streets, I lost it for a time, my view blocked by crowded buildings. Finally, I turned a corner and there it was, right above me. I pulled into a parking lot surrounded by blond stone, and there was Julien’s father’s convertible with its busted lid. I parked next to it, cut the engine. I wondered if he had already decided he was done with me. He’d suffered enough. Maybe it was already too late.

  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.