Extract from The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted

Extract from The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted by Bridget Asher
Original full-length edition published by Bantam Press, New York
Condensed version © Reader’s Digest (Australia) Pty Ltd 2011

Ever dreamed that the best place to stay in summer would be sunny Provence, in the south of France? That’s what Heidi yearned for when she set out for an old family farmhouse near Mont Sainte-Victoire. A young widow mourning the loss of her husband, Heidi took along Abbott, her eight-year-old son and her niece Charlotte. But things went wrong from the start, when their hired care broke down and all their things were stolen. Neighbours came to the rescue and they spent the first night in the house without their possessions.

When I woke up the next morning, for a moment I didn’t know what bed I was in. I’d slept in only a white bathrobe, with the windows open. The room was empty. My things gone. For a moment, I didn’t feel like I’d been robbed; I felt like I’d been released.

 

We’d hung our clothes on a rickety wooden drying rack. The air was so dry that the clothes dried stiff.

While Abbot shook out our shoes, just to be sure there were no scorpions, I jotted a list of all the things we’d need. The list was long. We needed everything—including, most important, a charger for Charlotte’s phone.

I looked up as I wrote this down. ‘Forty-one missed messages?’

‘Briskowitz,’ she said. ‘I think he gets on there and just starts reading The Iliad or something. Who knows.’ Then she changed the subject, rolling her shoulders around in her shirt. She said to Abbott, ‘Does your shirt feel freshly starched, Absteriser?’

‘It’s like wearing an exoskeleton,’ Abbot said.

As we stepped out the back door to walk to the Dumonteils’ house next door, for breakfast, we saw the mountain in full morning sun. It took on a bright azure, its shadows orange, looking luminous, rippling like a gown from the sky to the earth. This seemed like the best way to step out of any house into the world.

‘It’s bigger today than it was yesterday,’ Abbot said.

‘It’s kind of humbling,’ Charlotte said.

Abbot, Charlotte and I made our way down a small path worn in the grass from our back door to the Dumonteils’ back door. We walked up the steps and gave a knock.

‘Entrez!’ a woman’s voice called out.

We stepped into the cool, dark foyer at the back of the house. There was a ruby-coloured Persian runner on the floor, orangey and pink, that stretched down the length of the hall all the way to the front door, which stood at the other end.

Véronique appeared from the doorway on the right—the kitchen. She clapped flour from her hands—small bursts of white clouds. We did the cheek kisses.

‘Look at this boy!’ she said about Abbot. ‘He has a little of you.’ This made Abbot proud because it meant he had a lot of his father.

Julien walked down a set of pantry stairs into the room. I didn’t remember his being so tall, though he was slouching, a little beaten from the night before. He was unshaven, wearing white trousers, a white shirt without a collar, and he was barefoot.

Evidently, he hadn’t expected to run into anyone. ‘I was coming down to steal breakfast.’ I noticed that he had beautiful teeth that flashed when he spoke and one dimple. I remembered his face from when he was a child, when we used to stay in the farmhouse and he and his brother were home. Julien gave a shrug and then did the polite thing. He gave all of us kisses on either cheek.

‘What happened to your foot?’ Abbot asked Véronique.

‘I fell in mounting the stairs,’ she said, ‘like an old woman. It is broken. I asked a girl from the village to help me, but she was too young to comprehend work. So now Julien is helping me, but I don’t need it.’ She wagged her finger at him. ‘Julien, show them the dining room. I will arrive in an instant,’ she said.

Julien led us down the hall. ‘Did you sleep well?’ he asked.

‘Did you?’ I asked.

He smiled that old sheepish smile from our childhood. ‘Fine.’

‘No scorpions were in our shoes this morning,’ Abbot said.

‘The scorpions are rare. Probably you will not see one,’ he said.

‘Probably?’ Abbot muttered.

He walked into the elegant dining room. The walls were covered in portraits. A lowboy was covered with trays—pastries, coffee, sugar cubes, cream, a loaf of bread, a bowl of berries, butter, jam—as well as gorgeous pots, glazed in brilliant blues and reds.

Julien said, ‘My mother and I have a plan. I can take you to the police station in Trets and to the supermarket there. Meanwhile, the children can help my mother. And this afternoon, you will walk the land with my mother, Heidi. You will talk with her alone.’

‘Will the supermarket have clothes?’ I asked.

‘It will have everything. I could also take the family to the cath­edral in Saint Maximin later today,’ Julien offered.

Abbot let out a sad sigh. He’d had his fill of cathedrals.
‘This cathedral has a crypt,’ Julien said, in response to the sigh. ‘I could also throw in some … what do you call them? Pigs with big teeth?’ Julien said, gesturing tusks.

‘Wart hogs!’ Abbot said. ‘How many wart hogs?’

‘About thirty, maybe more. Do you want to come?’

Abbot thought about it and nodded.

Julien and I rolled onto the main road. We drove through Puyloubier and then the road widened, spreading into the vineyards on the slopes of Mont Sainte-Victoire. I loved the order of the vineyards. The thick trunk of the vine, the neat rows, the way leaves and fruit were supported by the guidelines.

‘I waited a long time for you to come back,’ Julien said, his shirt billowing in the gusty convertible. He was sexy in a way that most American men didn’t allow themselves to be. American men seemed stiff, as if trying to be masculine by its bulkiest definition. But European men are supposed to be sexy. They’re comfortable with the idea of it, and so, oddly enough, they’re sexy without even trying—or at least Julien was. His clothes cost good money, but he wore them loosely and confidently and elegantly.

‘What do you mean, you waited for me?’

‘You and your sister and your mother were strangers who took over our lives,’ he said. ‘My brother and I waited for news from you when you were not here. Sometimes there were pictures at Christmas. Not much. Some summers you would appear, magic, and then, just as quick, you were gone. And then, when you were becoming interesting, you stopped coming.’

I wondered if he was flirting with me. I guided the conversation to safe terrain. ‘So, you’re here helping your mother?’

‘I’m trying. She’s stubborn. But it’s good for me to help her now. A good distraction.’ I looked over at him—he had the same quick, dark eyes he’d had as a child. ‘I am running away, back to my childhood. Back to my mother, in fact,’ he said, staring at the road ahead. ‘That is what little boys do. They run away.’

‘Are you a little boy?’

‘This is what I have heard.’ He turned to me. ‘And you? Are you running away?’ he asked.

‘I’m not sure.’

It was quiet a moment. The stone farmhouses with their faded shutters and ancient equipment retired to rust in the Provence sun, waiting for the winter’s mistral to wind-whip them, to punish them for these gorgeous summer days. ‘So who calls you a little boy?’

‘My wife,’ he said.

‘You’re married?’

‘I am so new to divorced that I can count the number of times I have called myself that word on one hand. This is the fourth. She has the house, and I am staying here when I’m not travelling for business. My mother needs the help now, and so the timing is good for this. But I’m miserable, actually.’

‘You have a strange way of showing it.’

‘The more miserable you are, the harder you have to work at joy. They say that a divorce is harder to recover from than a death.’

‘They’re wrong,’ I said with an anger that surprised both of us.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, painfully embarrassed, but more than that. He was truly sorry. ‘My mother told me, and I don’t know why I would say something like that. It was in a book. But it’s stupid, of course. Death is death. I’m sorry, so sorry, that you lost him.’

‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘It’s stupid to compare misery anyway—death or divorce. Everyone has a right to their own suffering.’

‘Exactly,’ he said, and I could tell now that he felt so terrible that he would agree with anything I had to say at this point.

‘Let’s do it,’ I said, trying to break him out of it. ‘Let’s compare our misery. Find out which of us has it worse.’

‘No, no,’ he said.

‘You’re only afraid you’ll lose. You’re afraid that I’m more miser­able and that would make you feel more miserable for feeling ­miserable when really there are those more miserable, including me and people who are starving in war-torn countries.’

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘But I should tell you, I am very miserable.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll go first.’

‘Good, because I don’t know how you play this game.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Sometimes I pace instead of sleep, and I still sometimes cry so hard, I can barely breathe.’

‘I cannot sleep to begin.’

‘Well, I can’t really eat. And when I do I barely taste it.’

‘I eat and eat and eat, but never feel satisfaction.’

‘I think I see my husband everywhere,’ I said.

He looked over at me, startled. ‘I do this. I see the back of her head, her hair, her shoulders in a dress, and then she turns and it’s not her—another woman has taken her body.’

‘I lose everything all the time.’

‘I have lost fifty per cent of everything,’ he said, ‘including my daughter.’

I had all of Abbot, every bit of him. I closed my eyes for a moment very slowly and just let the sun warm my face. Julien’s confession resonated with my own grief. ‘What’s her name?’

‘Frieda. She is four years old. She’s with her mother for the summer,’ he said. ‘I needed to save my marriage—but I couldn’t. If I had been a better type of me, then I could have.’

‘My husband’s death was an accident,’ I said. ‘I was fifteen miles away. But I feel like I should have been able to save him.’

We’d turned onto a busier road now.

‘I’m not the first person to say it wasn’t your fault,’ Julien said. ‘People have told me the same, but, for me, they’re wrong, or at least half wrong. What does it matter?’

I leaned back in my seat. ‘I don’t want to get over it,’ I said. ‘That would be a real ending. I don’t want an ending.’

Julien stopped at a roundabout, waiting his turn. ‘I want to get over it,’ he said, ‘but I’m afraid I never will.’

‘Who’s more miserable, then?’ I asked. ‘You or me?’

With the car idling, he jiggled the stick shift. ‘The people starving in war-torn countries,’ he said.

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘They always win.’