The Love Season Read Online Free PDF Page A

cooking as profoundly as an amputated limb. It felt odd, sinful, to be back at it; it felt like she was breaking some kind of vow. Only for her , she thought. And it was just the one meal. Marguerite bumbled around at first; she moved too fast, wanting to do everything at once. She took three stainless-steel bowls from the cabinet; they clanged together like a primitive musical instrument. The bowls were dusty and needed a rinse, but first, Marguerite thought, she would get warm water for the bread (a hundred degrees, as she’d advised in the column she’d written about bread baking for the Calgary paper). There used to be a rhythm to her process, one step at a time. Slow down , she thought. Think about what you’re doing! She proofed her yeast in the largest of the bowls; then she mixed in sugar, salt, and a cup of flour until she had something theconsistency of pancake batter. She started adding flour, working it in, adding flour, working it in, until a baby-soft batch of dough formed under her hands. Marguerite added more flour—the dough was still sticky—and she kneaded, thinking, This feels wonderful; this is like medicine, I am happy . She thought, I want music . She pushed the play button of her stereo, leaving behind a white, floury smudge. When she dusted the smudge away in three or four days, would she remember this happiness? It would have evaporated, of course, transmogrified into another emotion, depending on how the dinner party went. What Marguerite was thriving on this second was the energy of anticipation. She had always loved it—the preparation, getting ready, every night a big night because at Les Parapluies the evenings when the numbers were the smallest had been the best evenings, the most eventful. The locals came, and the regulars; there was gossip flying from table to table; everyone drank too much.
    Ella Fitzgerald. Marguerite felt like singing along, but even shuttered inside her own house she was too shy—what if her neighbors heard, or the mailman? Now that it was summer, he came at irregular hours. So instead, Marguerite let her hands do the singing. She covered the bread dough with plastic wrap and put it in the sun, she pulled out her blender and added the ingredients for the pots de crème: eggs, sugar, half a cup of her morning coffee, heavy cream, and eight ounces of melted Schraffenberger chocolate. What could be easier? The food editor of the Calgary paper had sent Marguerite the chocolate in February as a gift, a thank-you—Marguerite had written this very recipe into her column for Valentine’s Day and reader response had been enthusiastic. (In the recipe, Marguerite had suggested the reader use “the richest, most decadent block of chocolate available in a fifty-mile radius. Do not—and I repeat —do not use Nestlé or Hershey’s!”) Marguerite hit the blender’spuree button and savored the noise of work. She poured the liquid chocolate into ramekins and placed them in the fridge.
    Porter had been wrong about the restaurant, wrong about what people would want or wouldn’t want. What people wanted was for a trained chef, a real authority, to show them how to eat. Marguerite built her clientele course by course, meal by meal: the freshest, ripest seasonal ingredients, a delicate balance of rich and creamy, bold and spicy, crunchy, salty, succulent. Everything from scratch. The occasional exception was made: Marguerite’s attorney, Damian Vix, was allergic to shellfish, one of the selectmen could not abide tomatoes or the spines of romaine lettuce. Vegetarian? Pregnancy cravings? Marguerite catered to many more whims than she liked to admit, and after the first few summers the customers trusted her. They stopped asking for their steaks well-done or mayonnaise on the side. They ate what she served: frog legs, rabbit and white bean stew under flaky pastry, quinoa.
    Porter had pressed her to add a seating to double her profits. Six thirty and nine , he said. Everybody’s