The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted

by Bridget Asher

  “The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted held me spellbound from the first word to the last, when I put it aside with a sigh of both regret and deepest satisfaction.… I madly, madly, madly loved this book!” —BARBARA O’NEAL, author of How to Bake a Perfect Life

  “Unabashedly romantic … a real charmer about a Provençal house that casts spells over the lovelorn.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted will have you canceling dinner plans, staying up all hours and flat-out ignoring your family, just so you can keep reading. Asher’s unflinching portrait of a grieving young widow is tempered by a powerful dose of humor and an unforgettable cast of characters. The result is an absorbing, beautifully written tale about life, death, love, food, and the magic of new possibilities.” —J. COURTNEY SULLIVAN, author of Commencement and Maine

  “Love and its sweet secrets bloom gloriously in The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted.… A sumptuous exploration of how grief, love, and joy, when stirred just right, ferry us home to the people and places we most cherish. Asher’s novel brims with wisdom and laughter, teaching us anew that hope resides in unexpected places: a charred box of beloved recipes, a troubled child’s earthy wisdom, an ailing house in need of an artful hand, a mother who listens to a silent mountain, and a kiss that unlocks the puzzle of what forever truly means.” —CONNIE MAY FOWLER, author of How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly and Before Women Had Wings

  “I enjoyed The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted so much—it’s well written, beautifully characterized, extremely atmospheric, and at times very touching—an enchanting and compelling tale.” —ISABEL WOLFF, author of A Vintage Affair

  ALSO BY BRIDGET ASHER

  My Husband’s Sweethearts

  The Pretend Wife

  The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is totally coincidental.

  A Bantam Books Trade Paperback Original

  Copyright © 2011 by Bridget Asher

  Reading group guide copyright © 2011 by Random House, Inc.

  Excerpt from The Pretend Wife © 2009 by Bridget Asher

  Excerpt from My Husband’s Sweethearts © 2008 by Bridget Asher

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. RANDOM HOUSE READER’S CIRCLE and colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-440-33872-7

  www.randomhousereaderscircle.com

  Cover design: Cara Petrus

  Cover photograph: Simon McBride/Red Cover/Getty Images

  v3.1

  This novel is dedicated to the reader.

  For this singular moment, it’s just the two of us.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Two

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Excerpt from The Pretend Wife

  Excerpt from My Husband’s Sweethearts

  A Reader’s Guide

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ere 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.

  ver 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 stran
ge 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 leaned 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.

  bbot 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.