The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted (44 page)

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.