The Love Season Read Online Free PDF

doing it .
    Yes , said Marguerite. And when I left high school all the other girls were becoming teachers or nurses. University was for boys; culinary school was for Europeans. I don’t do what other people do. If people want to eat at Les Parapluies, they will come at seven thirty. In return for this inconvenience, they will get their table for the entire night .
    But the profits , Porter said.
    I will not send Francesca out to breathe down somebody’s neck in the name of profits , Marguerite said. This restaurant is not about profits .
    What? Porter said.
    We’re in love , Marguerite had said, nodding at the dining room filled with empty chairs. Them and me .
    The song came to an end. The clock chimed the hour. Ten o’clock.Marguerite retreated to the bedroom to phone the A&P and order the meat. A three-pound tenderloin was the smallest available.
    “Fine,” Marguerite said. It would be way too much, but Marguerite would wrap the leftovers and send them home for the fiancé on Hulbert Avenue.
    There was another startling noise. Marguerite, who had been sitting on the bed next to the phone, jumped to her feet. In the last twelve hours, the noises had come like gunshots. What was that high-pitched ringing? The CD player gone awry? Marguerite hurried out to the living room. The CD player waited silently. The noise was coming from the kitchen. Aha! It was the long-forgotten drone of the stove’s timer. The mussels were done.
    10:07 A.M.
    Renata hadn’t counted on being alone, and yet that was exactly what had happened. Cade and his father were sailing and Suzanne was off for tennis, leaving Renata with two blank hours until she was expected at the yacht club. She wanted to go running; it was the coffee, maybe, combined with the antsy-weird feeling of being alone in the house. As Renata climbed the back stairs—she had never stayed in a house that had back stairs—to the guest room to change, she found Mr. Rogers weaving deftly between the spindles of the banister. So she was not alone after all.
    She dressed in her exercise clothes and gathered her hair into a ponytail. On a scale of one to ten, her guilt was at a six and a half and climbing. Before she embarked on this weekend trip to Nantucket, she had promised her father only one thing: that she would not, under any circumstances,contact Marguerite. But how could Renata resist? She had been dreaming about contacting Marguerite since she and Cade boarded the plane yesterday morning; she had been dreaming of it since the day, ten months earlier, when Cade told her his parents had a house on Nantucket.
    Nantucket? she’d said.
    You know it?
    Know it? she said. I was born there. My parents’ life was there. My godmother is there .
    But Renata didn’t really know Nantucket, not the way Cade did, coming every summer of his life.
    I’ll take you this summer , Cade had said.
    That was back in October; they had been dating for two weeks. But even then, Renata had thought, Yes. Marguerite .
    To Renata, Marguerite was like a shipwreck. She had, somewhere within her hull, a treasure trove of information about Candace, information Renata had never been privy to. And now that Renata was an adult, now that she was a woman about to be married , she wanted to hear stories about her mother, even silly, inconsequential ones, and who better to tell her than her mother’s best friend? The fact that Daniel Knox had forbidden Renata from contacting Marguerite—had, in fact, kept them apart since Candace’s death—only fueled Renata’s desire to see the woman. There was something her father didn’t want her to learn, possibly many somethings. She’s crazy , Daniel Knox had said. She’s been institutionalized . But Marguerite hadn’t sounded crazy on the phone. She had sounded just the way Renata always imagined—cultivated, elegant, and delighted to hear Renata’s voice. As if she couldn’t believe it, either: They were finally going to be reunited.
    Renata jogged down the