The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted

by Bridget Asher

  “But first!” Véronique said, and I thought for a moment of Hercule Poirot from the movies made of old Agatha Christie novels that I loved as a child. I was expecting her to say, I would like to tell all of you why I have asked you here today, and then to go on to discuss our various ties to a murder. “Before going, I want to walk the land with Heidi,” she said, a silent h, which made my name sound like ID—as if walking the land required us to take proper identification. I was a little afraid of Véronique and in awe of her, too. She seemed like a powerful force, running this bed-and-breakfast on her own, having been divorced for so long. She kept an eye on me, as if she were trying to see inside of me. I wondered what she was looking for. “It will take a moment to prepare,” she said.

  “I was going to do some unpacking in the house,” I said. “Why don’t you come over when you’re ready?”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “And then we’ll go see cathedrals and warthogs,” I said. “I don’t want to miss them.”

  Charlotte and Abbot began helping Julien prepare sack lunches that we would eat on our outing, and I went back to our house to put away the things from the Monoprix and to organize.

  During the short walk between the two houses, the mountain surprised me again. It appeared so suddenly and was so massive that it could stop me in my tracks. The fact that this was what a backyard could look out onto still seemed unnatural—not to mention the dig, archaeologists in the distance arguing next to the pattern they’d cut into the earth.

  I walked into the house, and it was strange to be there alone, the quiet settling around me. I moved quickly, divvying our new clothes into piles, putting food into the cupboards, the mini fridge. If, thousands of years from now, the house was dug up, our things unearthed, it would be quite a stack, I decided. How would these things define us? What would it mean—our wrappers, our plastic, rubbery toothbrushes, our chunky adapters? I thought of the archaeologists, what it’s like to unearth the past, to dust it off and try to re-create some semblance of what lives had once been lived. It wasn’t really possible. If they dug this up, they would find no trace of Henry. Yet, Henry still had the greatest presence of all.

  I dug to the bottom of one bag and found the charger. Charlotte’s phone was where she’d left it, on the kitchen table. I plugged it in with the adapter. It gave a hearty beep and blinked to life. There were now fifty-seven missed calls.

  Adam Briskowitz, I thought to myself. Poor kid. Was he pining away? I imagined John Cusack in Say Anything, the boom box raised over his head—that failed serenade.

  I went upstairs to my room and changed into a skirt and a T-shirt, some of the casual clothes bought at the Monoprix, and flip-flops.

  As I walked back down the steep, narrow stone steps, I heard the buzz of Charlotte’s phone as it rattled against the kitchen table.

  I picked up the phone. The caller ID read BRISKY.

  I sighed. “Brisky,” I said to myself, and flipped open the phone. “Hello?”

  “Hello?” he said, astonished. “Hello? Charlotte? Hello?”

  “It’s Charlotte’s aunt,” I said. “Heidi.”

  “Is Charlotte there? Can I talk to her? This is urgent. I’ve been trying to reach her, and it’s really very urgent.”

  “She isn’t here right now,” I said.

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s here with me, in France.”

  “She flew to France?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I don’t think she wants to talk to you, but I can take a message since I don’t think she’s listening to the ones you leave.”

  “It was really irresponsible of her to fly to France,” Adam said, more to himself than to me.

  “Irresponsible?”

  “Yes,” he said. “She really shouldn’t have done that. At least, I don’t think she should have. Do you?”

  “Is that the message you’d like me to give her?” I asked. “That she’s irresponsible because she’s traveling this summer?”

  “No,” he said, the edge of his voice softening. “No, please. Please tell her that I love her. And that I didn’t mean for her to get Briskowitzed.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m not familiar with that term, but I’ll tell her.”

  “And I know she doesn’t want to see me,” he said, “but maybe I could write her a letter? An old-fashioned letter?”

  “That might be better,” I said. “We haven’t yet gotten online here.”

  “What’s the address?” I could hear him scrambling for pen and paper.

  I walked over to the fridge, and I read the address that was posted there.

  He repeated it back to me and I confirmed.

  “Great,” he said. “Thank you so much. You can forget my message. Don’t even tell her I called. I’ll send a letter out today, explaining everything. So, we have a deal?”

  “We do.”

  “Yes, yes, okay, thank you so much. Excellent,” he said. “I’ll never forget this. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said. “Bye.”

  “Au revoir!” he said then, in a lousy accent. “Merci and au revoir!”

  ézanne regarded Mont Sainte-Victoire from the front. We see the mountain from the side. La longueur. A wider canvas,” Véronique said. We had walked out of the back door of her house, past the gravel driveway, toward the vineyards and the archaeological dig, now abandoned in the heat of the day. She had a cane with her, a cane with a marble handle. She didn’t use it to walk as much as to point things out. It was such a natural accessory I wondered how she’d ever done without it. “The mountain changes color through the day, if you have patience. Your mother watched this mountain for a long time that final summer she visited us.”

  I wasn’t sure how to take this bit of information. I had the impression that Véronique wanted me to ask a question but I wasn’t sure what it should be. I only remembered our lives without her—my father in the kitchen, fumbling with the can opener. I guess you should be prepared to make a decision between the two of us. Who knows how this cookie will crumble? The cookie didn’t crumble. She came home. I tried not to dwell on what her lost summer meant to her or to me. It was lost. She was found and returned to us. But now that I was here, I couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to her. What had she learned that allowed her to come back?

  “The mountain’s beautiful,” I said simply.

  She paused, waiting for something more. “Yes,” she said. “It is.” She pointed to a tree some distance between our two houses. “That is where your land commences. The line goes all the way to that tree, more or less.” This divided our properties as if the driveway between the two continued as a boundary. “That is yours. We will walk the perimeter.”

  “But your foot,” I said.

  “I have to keep moving. The circulation,” she said, “it moves and it is good for the bones.” We walked for a bit. “Your mother is a very strong woman,” she said.

  “I think she had a lot on her mind the last time she was here. I guess she had to decide whether or not to come home, if we were worth it or if she should chuck it all for life in Provence.” I meant this as a joke, kind of, but the lightness didn’t translate.

  “Her children were always worth it. The question was her husband,” she said. “He was—a cheat? That’s what you call them?”

  I nodded, uncomfortable with my father being called a cheat, even though he had been one. He was still my father, and after all of these years devoted to salvaging their marriage, I’d restored him to some higher position.

  “My ex-husband was an imperialist. He was a cheat. He left. When your mother was here that summer with her marriage breaking, my marriage was breaking, too.” I hadn’t known this. It was something more that my mother and Véronique shared.

  “Where is your husband now?”

  “He is dead. He left us during a winter. Not a word. He took another family and lived in Arles. The boys did not have a father, not in reality.” She sighed. “And I pre
fer this. Without a man.”

  “See, it’s possible to be a woman on her own terms and to be happy,” I said. “I can appreciate that.”

  She stopped and dug her cane into the dirt. “No,” she said. “I closed the doors of my heart and they were locked. Your mother could not do this. She has a heart with open doors. She has left the doors open. One woman closes and locks her heart. Another leaves the doors open. Who is strong? Who is weak? Maybe both are only stubborn?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “When she was here, my marriage ended. We lived together, but I knew that he would leave one day. After he was gone, I had lovers but did not fall in love. I closed the doors because of fear. That is not a good life. But I made my rules and now I’m content.”

  “I think that making your own rules, making your own happiness is good,” I said.

  She glanced at me and I felt immediately transparent. Had I closed the doors to my heart out of fear, and were they locked? She started walking again. “So, after so many years, was your father worth it? Is she happy?”

  I nodded. “I think she’s happy. They have a strong marriage.” This was my attempt at telling her that my father hadn’t cheated again. It had been a one-time thing.

  “I see,” she said, without a hint of emotion.

  I wanted to edge away from my mother’s life. It frightened me now. I could see how powerful it must have been for her to be here, on this solid ground with this mountain’s gravity, and, from here, how very small and frail her family must have seemed, so far away. Did she try to imagine Elysius and me in our swimming lessons, singing at day camp, trying to fall asleep at night? Did she wonder if we had wandered into poison ivy, had sunburn, had gone hiking without our hats and now had a tick crawling through our hair? These were the things she was supposed to take care of. My father knew nothing about any of these things. Elysius and I took care of each other that summer. I got my period for the first time, and Elysius was the one who showed me the box of pads hidden in the linen closet, and who taught me to use cold water and salt to scrub a spot of blood from my sheets. Did my mother know that we were going through the motions and waiting, holding our collective breath, for her to return to us? I said to Véronique, “My mother told me that you’d have information for me about renovating the house, about the … bureaucracy? Maybe you have some people to recommend? I’d like to get things under way, you know, really have the construction going before I leave. Then I can check in and see if we’re on track.”

  “You are here for how much time?”

  “Six weeks,” I said.

  She started laughing.

  “What’s funny?”

  She laughed so hard now that she had to stop and try to catch her breath.

  “Seriously,” I said, a little offended now. “What’s so funny?”

  “Your mother,” she said, shaking her head, regaining composure. “She is a very funny woman.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This is France!” she said with a wave of her arm. “You will wait one to two months to obtain the permis de construire and to obtain the devis from the workers, le cahier des charges.”

  “Permis de construire, you mean construction permits?”

  She nodded. “From the government.”

  “The devis is the cahier des charges? The quote?”

  “The devis is, how do you say it, when you ask the worker for his price? Le cahier des charges is a very long document here with very specific details. And you want these with les tiroirs.”

  “With drawers?”

  “Of course,” she said as if this explained what drawers had to do with a bid. “And it is difficult to make the workers arrive and make this document. You have to call them and ask them many times and you must tell them that you have heard spoken wonderful things about their work, bouche-à-oreille, ‘mouth to ear.’ If they’re quick to arrive, do you really want them?”

  She talked a bit more, but all I understood was that some things about construction were universal. Everything would take longer than they predicted. Everything would cost more money than they predicted. And one thing that was predictable was that something unpredictable would happen in the course of something seemingly small and predictable. Then she looked at me very seriously. “It may be that no one will touch a thing for months.”

  “I won’t be here months from now!”

  “This is good. Because when they begin to break the walls, you will be living in dust. You will breathe the house into your lungs and taste it in everything. It is better to not be here.”

  “And you think that my mother knew this all along?”

  “She wanted you here. She pulled you here.”

  “Was the fire faked?”

  She shook her head and made a tsk, tsk noise as the French do. “The fire was real, but she used it to bring you here.”

  I looked up at the mountains, the ground, then at the house itself. “But she also showed me magazines completely devoted to tile! She gave me paint samples! She lectured me about bringing in a modern touch. She told me to feel and connect to the house and allow decisions to form!”

  “Ah!” Véronique raised her finger in the air, smiling. “Et voilà! All of these things you can do!”

  By this point we were standing by the gate around the empty pool filled with dead leaves. Months? It would take the French months of bureaucracy? I would have to kiss up to the workers just to get them to give me a quote?

  “The pool is not broken, but it has a crack,” Véronique said.

  “How many months will that take?” My tone was surely pissy.

  “I can arrange this. I know someone who will come for the pool,” she said.

  “I’d like to get it filled with water.”

  “Water is possible.”

  “Can I get the fountain going again? Maybe put in some koi?”

  “Koi?”

  “Fish.”

  “The pump,” she said, “is broken. That we can fix without permits. We can put in water, but finally you will want to work on the stone.”

  “I’d like koi,” I said, aware that I was sounding petulant. “At the very least.”

  She looked out toward the excavation and pointed at the mounds of dirt with her cane. “These are the real workers. They found a tomb,” she said.

  “That’s what Julien told us,” I said, trying to shake off my frustrations with my mother, what now felt like a fake mission.

  “Bones,” Véronique said. “We are all eventually bones.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “Well, not always eventually. Some die before they get to eventually. Eventually is a gift.”

  “Your mother told me about your husband,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I promise to you I will not force sympathy on you. I have always hated sympathy.” She smiled.

  “Me, too,” I said.

  “I have something of your mother’s. Something that was found after the fire.”

  “What is it?” I couldn’t imagine what this could be. My wily mother. I thought of the yellow swimsuit in the picture of her by the pool. I never saw her in that swimsuit at home. Had she bought it here and left it behind? This thought made no sense. Of course Véronique wouldn’t have held on to a swimsuit all these years.

  “I will give it to you before you go. It is small. But I think it will be important to her. Only a small box of things.” The wind rippled her shirt. And before I could ask her to tell me what it was, she said, “You know that your mother is a thief.” She said this without anger, just stating a fact.

  “A thief?” I said. No one ever said anything bad about my mother, not ever. On the other hand, she wasn’t the kind of person people gushed about. No. People didn’t stop me in town to tell me that my mother had brought over a casserole at their darkest hour or that she’d done a wonderful job raising money for charity. But no one ever said anything bad about her. “My mother? Did she take something from you?”

  “A little thief. A h
eart thief.”

  “What does that mean, a heart thief?”

  Véronique shook her head. She wasn’t going to talk about it. It dawned on me now that there must be some misunderstanding. A heart thief sounded like a nice term for adulterer, mistress, home wrecker. Was my mother a home wrecker? Had she somehow played a part in the departure of Véronique’s husband? I thought of a story my mother had told me once about a friend of hers who was treated badly by her relatives in a foreign country for years after the death of an aunt. One of the relatives finally explained that she’d never given them the ring she’d promised. “What ring?” my mother’s friend said. They explained, “You told us you would give us a ring, and it never arrived.” My mother’s friend had to explain the expression—give you a ring, a call. There was no actual ring. Maybe this is the kind of thing that had happened here. I decided that it was a simple misunderstanding that we could unravel and then laugh about later.

  Véronique hooked the cane on her elbow and crossed her arms. “I am worried about the house and the land. What will happen when I’m gone.”

  This took me by surprise, the confession as well as the fact that she’d chosen me to tell. I was a little afraid of her, but also drawn to her. This conversation was loaded and vexing and hard to follow, but it was strangely exhilarating. I had no idea where it might go next.

  “I’m old,” she said.

  “Would Julien want the house?”

  “The boys would fight. They have problems, as you know.” I didn’t know anything about the boys’ problems. She shook her head. “The children want money these days. They will sell the house.”

  “Have you asked them?”

  “No,” she said. “When they sell, this will be a good time to sell your house, too. Someone may want both of the houses and the land.”

  “It’s not mine to sell,” I said.

  “I see.”

  “What about Pascal?” I asked.

  She shook her head and clucked her tongue.

  “Look,” I said. “I think you should tell the boys that you’re worried. They might love the chance to make it their own. They might surprise you.”

  “Voilà,” she said, touching my arm. “I hear it so clearly. Your voice, you are like your mother, no?”