The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted (2 page)

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 strange 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.

“He’s in there!” Abbot said.

“He can’t be. It’s his wedding day.”

Abbot knocked, and Daniel appeared behind the glass door, opened it wide. He was broad-shouldered, always tan, his hair tinged silvery gray. He had a regal nose that sat a little arched and bulky on his face—an elegant face. He took off his glasses, tucked his chin to his chest in a way that made his chins fold up like a little accordion, and looked at me, messy but in a lovely dress, and Abbot, in his not-yet-garnished tux. He smiled broadly. “I’m so glad you’re here! How’s it hangin’, Abbot?” He pulled Abbot to him, gave him a bear hug. That’s what Abbot needed, bear hugs, affection, from fatherly types. I was good at pecking foreheads, but I could tell how happy he was to be lifted up off his feet by Daniel. Abbot had a silly grin on his face now. Daniel hugged me, too. He smelled of expensive products—hair gels and imported soaps.