Cooking for Picasso Read Online Free PDF

your approval. Please let us know if there is anything we can do to improve our service. We shall return for the dishes and will tidy up afterwards. Bon appétit.
    —
    O NDINE PROPPED THE note beside the fruit bowl. Then she slipped out the kitchen door, hopped on her bicycle and pedaled rapidly away from the house without a backward glance.
    She loved the feeling of how much lighter the bicycle was now without the food hamper. Turning out of Monsieur Picasso’s street, she steered back onto the bigger road with its high-walled villas on both sides. At the top of this steep hill with its extraordinary view, she felt a sudden thrill in that brief, suspended moment before takeoff, poised between the bright sky hanging above her and the wide sea stretching beyond the harbor below.
    Then she took the plunge, coasting down, down, down the hill—yet it felt more like a wonderful upward lift, as if she’d taken flight like a bird. Picking up more speed, it seemed that her flying hair and skirt were wings that might just carry her up, up and away to the great wide world beyond.
    “Hooray!” Ondine cried aloud, feeling weightless and fearless and free.
    But when she arrived at the farmers’ market on the other side of town to pick up new flowers as her mother instructed, she felt her spirits quickly plummet back to earth under the sharp gazes of the farmers’ wives who presided over the spring harvests that their customers had eagerly awaited. The florist’s stall was a riot of bright color, and the fruit and vegetables were piled high in perfect pyramids.
    “
Bonjour
Ondine!” the butcher’s stout wife called out, eyeing her speculatively.
    “
Bonjour
Ondine!” the red-haired flower vendor chirped as Ondine pulled up to her stall.
    “Where have you been on your bicycle today?” demanded the skinny fruit-seller.
    “A new
Patron,
” Ondine said neutrally, nodding in the general direction of the villas. Too late, she realized that there were so few holiday renters at this time of year that any visitor was bound to be news to this gaggle of gossips.
    “You mean that Spaniard at the top of the hill?” the fruit-seller said, handing Ondine a small blood-orange to eat. “I hear he’s got a lady-friend down here that he sees on the weekends. But what does he do with the rest of his time?”
    The florist, reaching in among her blooms to pull out the delicate daffodils that Ondine pointed to, said conspiratorially, “He’s a suspicious character; no one ever sees him during the day, but my brother Rafaello says he keeps his lights burning well past midnight!” Rafaello was a policeman who patrolled the neighborhood at odd hours and, after years of seeing the darker side of human nature, habitually viewed most people as potential criminals.
    “Mark my words, that new tenant is a bank robber, hiding out with his loot!” the butcher’s wife agreed. “I ask you—who else rents a whole house off-season all to himself, with no family?”
    The others also found voluntary solitude so incomprehensible that they quickly retreated to the
terra firma
of their usual gossip about which local girls might get engaged this spring. Sooner or later, everyone became the subject of their wagging tongues.
    “Don’t worry, Ondine,” piped up the little
fromagère,
arranging creamy mounds of cheese in appetizing rows on a wooden board. “Your day will come to marry and have children. The wheel turns.”
    “The wheel turns!” the others echoed wisely.
    Ondine paid for her flowers and hastily pedaled away. She knew that those women didn’t really mean to be so hurtful, but all they could imagine was that Luc had met a bad end or else found another girl wherever he was. Ondine had tried not to even consider such possibilities. Now something about their pragmatic marketplace chatter had revived her doubts about her own judgment, even today.
    What if the
Patron
was displeased with the note she’d just left for him? A girl like