The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted

by Bridget Asher

  “And you should be.”

  “And I am!”

  I turned to him. “How did you two let this happen? How? Can I ask that?”

  “Of course you can ask,” he said. “That’s only fair. A good question.” He coughed into his fist. “Well, there was this one time that, after, you know, and we weren’t maniacs or anything, it wasn’t like we were going nuts all the time.…”

  “I get it. Go on.”

  “It was gone after. Just poof! We couldn’t find it.”

  “The condom?”

  “Bingo,” he said. “It was just …”

  “Poof.”

  “MIA,” he said. “Later, you know, she found it. But, well, the timing of that event must have been pretty, um, serendipitous.”

  “Serendipitous.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “What I want people to know, for the record, is that we were trying to be safe. And maybe I didn’t put it on well enough, maybe there was sloppiness in my execution of that … point … issue … but, well, there you have it. It’s not something Bert and Peg asked, but I can see a future conversation in which it comes up.”

  “If I could offer a suggestion,” I said.

  “Of course.”

  “I wouldn’t use the word serendipitous. I’d try to tell the story simply, honestly.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “And so in the spirit of simplicity and honesty,” I said, “do you love Charlotte?”

  “I do love Charlotte,” he said, without hesitation. “I don’t know what to do about it, but I love her.”

  We sat there quietly until Charlotte returned. She’d been crying.

  Adam got up and walked to her. He wrapped his arms around her and she put her head on his shoulder. When she lifted her head, he asked, “How was it? What did they say?”

  She looked at me and smiled. “Elysius was Elysius. At first, she wasn’t really as surprised as I’d have wanted her to be. She’s always expected something like this from me, I guess. And then my dad …” She laughed a little. “He said that being pregnant at my age would stunt my growth. I informed him that I haven’t grown a millimeter since seventh grade. This was news to him. Then he started to get upset, really upset. But Elysius kicked in. She was great. She calmed him down, and by the end, he was saying all the right things.”

  “What are the right things to say?” Adam asked.

  “He was saying that my health and the health of the baby were the most important things right now.” She sat down beside me on the fountain. “He said it was his instinct to get on a plane.” Her voice caught in her throat. “He can’t, of course. He’s already taken off ten days for the honeymoon, and he needs to work.”

  I put my arm around her shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “Well, on the upside, he’s going to tell my mother for me, and”—she took a deep breath—“he’s sending Elysius.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “To bring me home.”

  “Do you want to go home?” I asked.

  “I could take you home,” Adam said.

  “Aren’t you grounded?” Charlotte said.

  “That’s not even funny,” Adam said.

  “Do you want to go home?” I asked again.

  Charlotte looked around. “I love it here. I love the mountain. I love that I can breathe a little and no one’s making me shove my nose in a book so that I can go off and get good test scores and be some robot who gets into a good college. I’m learning to cook, and Abbot needs me and people seem to like me. And I feel sure of myself here. We have about three more weeks. So, no,” she said. “I don’t want to go. They can’t force me to.” She looked at me. I didn’t know what to say. She shook her head and rubbed tears from her eyes. “Except that they can force me to go home. I know,” she whispered. “I know.”

  decided to wait for my family to call me. I knew that they would. I expected that Elysius would be first. Maybe she would put Daniel on the line with me. They would want to know how Charlotte was really holding up, the story from my perspective. They’d want to know how long I knew—if I had been in on it in some way—and they’d pump me for information about Briskowitz, whom I was sure they would view as a problem that needed solving.

  I assumed my mother would call next, as Elysius would rope her in immediately. The news of Charlotte’s pregnancy would snap my mother out of her reveries, perhaps. She would kick in to high gear. She’d be prepared, in an instant, to be there for Charlotte and Elysius, and she would commence, without delay, mentally rearranging lives.

  What I didn’t expect was a call from my father. I was on a ladder in Charlotte’s bedroom, doing the trim work, when Charlotte’s phone rang on her bedside table. My father wasn’t one for talking on the phone. He still had some old-world notion of the phone as a kind of tool to be used in emergencies. “Phones aren’t walkie-talkies,” my mother would tell him. “You don’t have to just state your coordinates.” I assume that his distaste for phones and the idle conversations that took place on them had something to do with his definition of masculinity. He did own a cell phone, but only perhaps because they seemed more like walkie-talkies. But the number that appeared on the caller ID of Charlotte’s phone was their landline, so I answered it expecting my mother.

  I climbed down the ladder. “Hey, so you heard.”

  “I did,” he said, his voice startling me.

  “Oh, Dad,” I said, and I was immediately alarmed. “Are you okay?”

  “Your mother is coming over, too.”

  “With Elysius? Here?”

  “Correct.”

  “Why?” I asked. I was afraid I knew why: It had to do with her sleeplessness, what it meant for her to think of herself as a thief. But, too, I knew that my father knew none of this, so asking why was pointless. He wouldn’t know the real reason. I steadied myself with one hand on a rung of the ladder.

  He said, “She’s been an awful wreck, Heidi. An awful wreck. She’s pretending to be fine, but she isn’t. Not at all. And …” His voice was shaky. I wondered if he was going to be able to go on. “And she needs to put it to rest.”

  “Put what to rest?”

  “I’ve put my past to rest,” he said. “I did it ages ago, but now she needs to.”

  “What past?”

  “Her affair,” he said. “She had an affair that summer she left us.”

  “Who did she have an affair with?” I asked, trying desperately to sound appropriately shocked, as if this was the first I’d heard of it.

  “She came back,” he said. “That was all that ever mattered to me. But I was wrong. She needs to find out if she should have come back. I’d like her to know that. I think it would be better.”

  “Who did she have an affair with?” I asked again.

  “You’re asking the wrong question,” he said. “C’mon.”

  “I think it’s a perfectly good question.”

  “It’s a question young people ask.”

  “Why are you telling me this? What do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to tell her that she has to figure this out. She has to get to the root of it. She has to find out what her life would have been like.” The line was quiet. I didn’t know what to say. “Will you do that for me?” he asked.

  “I will,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said. “Take care of Charlotte. She’ll need you most of all.”

  “Really?” I said. “But Elysius and Mom are coming, and Adam is here, and—”

  “She’s already chosen you, honey.”

  “Oh,” I said, unsure whether I was surprised by the insight or that it had come from him. Insights weren’t his forte, but he’d just proved that he’d had more insight into my mother than I’d ever given him credit for. I thought of Charlotte’s comment on love—that she wanted love from the beginning like it was with Henry. Was that one of the reasons she’d chosen me?

  “Okay, I don’t want to hog the line,” he said, in his typical fashio
n, his let’s wrap-this-up-quickly phone voice. “Talk to you later.”

  “Yes,” I said, knowing how desperate he was to hang up. “I love you.”

  There was a hitch in his breath, and I was surprised that he paused, hogging the line, as he would say, but he did. He took a moment, and then, in a voice rough and choked, said, “I love you, too.”

  efore the celebrations of Bastille Day began, we ate a picnic in the front yard of the Dumonteils’ house. It was a sumptuous meal. First there was the moules à la marinière—mussels marinated in white wine, butter, onions, pepper, and lemon with plenty of parsley—then a bouillabaisse that included eel and green crabs. Charlotte explained the derivation of bouillabaisse, bout et abaisse, meaning “boil and press.” Next there was a salad with warmed goat cheese, and finally an assortment of desserts I’d picked up at the patisserie.

  Julien, I noticed, seemed anxious. He was keeping an eye on the long driveway. More than once he got up from his place and walked to the edge of the yard where it becomes brambles, as if he’d seen a car turn down the drive.

  “Who’s coming?” I asked Véronique, who was sitting next to me at one of the small tables.

  “His wife,” she said. “More papers to sign. The bureaucracy has no end. I don’t know why he walks like that. She is always punctual. Absolutely on time. Like the Swiss.”

  Patricia. I was surprised by my reaction—curiosity, yes, but also a small hive of jealousy abuzz in my chest. The questions in my head began innocently enough: Would she sneeze four times in the sun? Would I see her charm bracelet for myself? But then I felt myself turn snarky: Would she look like the daughter of an opera singer? And what would that look like, exactly? Someone with excellent posture, ready to belt it out? Someone wearing a Viking helmet with horns?

  I had to prepare for the fact that she would likely be elegant, perhaps even beautiful, and in that elegant beauty that the French wear with such ease. The French didn’t doll up. They never looked like they’d sprayed their hair stiff or coated their face in a tan base, leaving their necks pale. They looked, more often than not, like they used expensive night creams but truly believed in hydration. I quickly decided Patricia would be overbearingly naturally beautiful.

  And would she bring Frieda? I hoped not. That would only be a form of torture for Julien. I could tell that the end of marriage was one thing, but the rupture of the family was another, deeper wound. It would be painful either way.

  We’d all been talking, probably at the same time, about socialism, the erosion of the maximum thirty-five-hour workweek set by the French government, when a car slowly pulled up the driveway. Véronique told us that the town was supported by government funds. How else could the shops afford to compete with the massive expanse and bulk rates of the Monoprix? This explained the odd hours, the feeling I got that they didn’t need to make money—they didn’t. There was a loud discussion about free markets, capitalism—all of those things Americans should argue about, for or against, while in Europe.

  “Excuse me,” Julien said, and he quietly slipped away.

  I watched him jog across the broad yard. The door to the backseat popped open first, and a little girl jumped out. She was beautiful and quick. He picked her up and lifted her onto his back. She wrapped her arms around his neck and they pressed their heads together. Frieda. She had delicate features, a little pout of a mouth. She was stunning, her hair bouncing blond and halo-esque around her head.

  The passenger door opened next and Patricia stepped out. She wore walking shorts, cuffed at the knee, pleated, and elegant strappy heels. Her black shirt was sleeveless with a deep V-neck. Her arms were long and tan. She wore oversized sunglasses, and her hair had been highlighted a golden blond.

  They exchanged polite kisses on their cheeks. She was holding a folder. They talked solemnly at the hood of the car, Frieda still clinging to Julien’s shoulders, piggyback.

  And then, much to my surprise, the driver’s door opened and a man stepped out. He was just a bit taller than Julien, thicker, too. He had dark hair and eyes, just as Julien did, and a quick smile. I nearly recognized him, but before I could, Véronique stood up and said, “Pascal.”

  And there are certain moments in your life when something becomes clear, and other things in the past—things that your mind, unbeknownst to you, had earmarked because they didn’t quite add up—suddenly all click into place, like small gears in a watch.

  In this moment, I remembered all of the little things that could have prepared me for this shock. Hadn’t Véronique herself told me that the boys had problems getting along these days? She said it as if I knew the history between them, and I had assumed that she meant the typical rivalries between brothers—not this. Julien himself had told me that Patricia had picked the wrong one. I’d thought it was a strange translation but nothing more. Now I could see by the way Pascal walked over and stood next to Patricia, slipping his hand around her waist, that Julien had meant this quite literally. He’d been the wrong choice—the wrong brother—and she’d corrected her mistake.

  Worst of all, I remembered when I first talked to Julien at the beginning of this trip, in the convertible in the rain. I’d told him that I preferred the other brother, the one with the pogo stick, and he’d told me that I was not alone.

  Véronique waved and limped to them. Pascal broke from Patricia and kissed his mother’s cheeks. Patricia handed Julien the folder and a pen. He started signing the forms on the hood of the car. Véronique was cooing over her granddaughter. She was talking to Patricia, obviously inviting her to join us, to stay. Patricia glanced in our direction, and I picked up my wine and took a sip. I made a blanket statement about feeling patriotic here in France. “In America when someone asks me my nationality, I can’t just say American. I have to go back generations, elaborate on where in Europe my ancestors were from. But here,” I said, “I can just say it, Je suis Américaine. It feels good.”

  “Except when it doesn’t,” Adam said.

  “That’s true,” I said. “We’ve had some shameful moments under shameful presidents.”

  I watched Pascal climb back into the driver’s seat. Patricia was holding Frieda now. The girl was crying, her face red and shiny with tears. She was rubbing a fistful of her mother’s hair between her fingers. Her mother hefted her into the backseat, where she helped buckle her in.

  Julien stood in the yard. As his ex-wife walked to the passenger’s door, he pressed his hand to the dark window of the backseat. He held it there until the car slowly pulled away.

  e gathered in the town center at dusk with the other villagers. Red, white, and blue pennants were strung across the face of the government building and draped through the trees. Julien was explaining to Abbot the storming of the Bastille, the French Revolution, the French Republic. He linked it up nicely with American history, Independence Day, how the two ideologies were knotted together in many ways.

  Charlotte and Adam were quiet. They looked a little shell shocked. It was perhaps unnoticeable to the casual observer, but they held hands tightly as they walked, lifting their arms over a darting child instead of simply letting go. Charlotte had said that Adam was scared shitless. They both were, but it was good that they had each other. As much as I wanted to help, there was nothing quite like Adam holding Charlotte’s hand, that kind of quiet, childlike reassurance.

  Véronique had stayed at home. “I’ve seen enough children with lights,” she said. “I will protect this bird.” And so Abbot lifted the box with the bird inside of it and handed it to her, very gently, and gave her instructions on how the bird would best fall asleep. She’d nodded along patiently.

  A woman with shiny dark hair called for all of the children. Abbot stepped up with the others. I looked around and realized that I recognized faces from town now. There were the people who worked at the Cocci, the Café Sainte Victoire, the old woman who scrubbed the marble bench. I recognized the mason with his wife, an ample woman with ruddy cheeks, and the baker, who was with
a little girl who seemed to be his granddaughter, a three-year-old or so, with floaty dark curls. I glanced through the crowd—the older men who played bocce ball in the afternoons, the others who had a miniature track and raced small motorized cars in the basement of the municipal building. Was the man my mother had an affair with still living in town? Was one of these men the one? I was reminded again of Hercule Poirot, that stout Belgian detective, this time playing the whodunit of my mother’s affair.

  Julien said, “The mayor. He’s here. Do you want to meet him?” He pointed to a very handsome man who looked, for all intents, to be a Hollywood actor. He was tan and lean, in his early fifties. He had black hair and wore dark jeans and a black T-shirt with a logo on it that, from what I could translate, was about a liberation movement for the cicadas of Provence. “Why does he want to free the cicadas?” I asked.

  “I think he’s being funny,” Julien said. “Come on, it will make my mother happy. He’ll want to meet you.”

  “No,” I said. “I want to tell you something.”

  “Are you angry with me for teaching Abbot the French national anthem?” he asked, jokingly. “He’s part French, so he should know a little about his mother country.”

  “Yeah, I heard you two belting it out in the pool together.”

  “Belting it out? We were professionals. We were very good. Not like you and your song ‘Brandy.’ We really sing.”

  “I heard you. I think people in Ireland heard you.”

  He smiled at me. “He is an amazing child. He told me the stories of the house. The enchantments and miracles, the love stories.”

  “Did he?”

  “I’d heard of this before, these stories. My mother told me when I was young. Not all of them, but some of them were familiar. He believes in the stories.”

  I was sure that Julien was asking if I believed in them, too. “He’s deep, that Abbot, and sensitive. He feels everything.”

  “He reminds me of Frieda in certain ways. The doors of their hearts are wide open, as my mother says.” There was Abbot buzzing around with the other kids, trying to talk to one in some strange English-French mix, no doubt. He’d brought his notebook on this occasion but was much too distracted to draw anything.