The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted Read Online Free PDF Page A

fatalities. I was afraid of men for the same reason I was afraid of frogs—because I couldn’t predict which way they would jump.
    In general, I saw love as entering into an agreement that depended on your willingness to compromise. This was rooted in my parents’ complicated marriage, of course. The story goes that my father, an attorney for the U.S. Patent Office, saved my mother from the typing pool.
    Problematic, on a feminist level, for many reasons, it was made worse because of one of our family secrets: my mother was brilliant. Her father came back from the war and opened a five and dime, which supported the family for years but was struggling by the time she reached college age and, to compound matters, her father’s health started to fail, and so collegewas completely out of the question. As a housewife, my mother watched all of the latest movies, even the foreign films, which she went to alone because my father refused to read subtitles. She referenced films by the names of their directors, a distinctly French trait. She gardened scientifically and read books on physics, history, philosophy, religion, but rarely mentioned these things. She led a quiet, secretive life of the mind. One Christmas, someone gave us the game of Trivial Pursuit. My mother knew all of the answers. We were startled. “How do you know all this stuff?” we kept asking. After the game was over and she won, she put the lid back on the box and never played again. Had my mother needed saving? She accepted the story that, indeed, she had. It was no wonder then that when I met Henry in the kitchen of that party all those years ago, I saw love as compromise, even weakness.
    Henry was the first person I met at the party. He was talking to the chef’s daughter—a towheaded third grader. He had a smile that hitched up on one side, a smile I immediately loved.
    He introduced himself. Henry Bartolozzi. The two names didn’t seem to fit together and I said something about it. He explained that Henry was his mother’s choice, the namesake of her grandfather, an old Southerner, and his last name was from his father’s Italian side.
    I told him my last name. “Buckley. A hard name to cart through middle school. I was a walking limerick.”
    He tapped his chin. “Does
Buckley
rhyme with something?Funny. I can’t think of anything.” Then he confessed that Fartolozzi hadn’t helped his middle school rep any. Raised in the Italian section of Boston—North End—he had an accent that was New England with a bounce, as if inspired partly by Fenway, partly by opera.
    I remembered that night, after the party spilled out onto the lawn, the towhead and her older brother lighting firecrackers that skittered across the pavement. It was dark. It was hard to tell if Henry was glancing at me or not.
    Later a lot of people piled into his old, rusty Honda, and when the radio accidentally hit an easy listening station, I started belting out “Brandy.” I confessed that I was this kind of unfortunate drunk, an easy listening diva. Despite this, or maybe because of it, Henry asked for my phone number.
    The very next night, a new friend of mine from school named Quinn invited me to dinner. I claimed I already had too much work. Quinn said, “Okay, it’ll just be me and Henry then.” And I said, “Henry Fartolozzi?” I told her I could change my plans.
    Henry brought bottles of a great Italian wine—a splurge; none of us had any money. Because I wasn’t used to the low futon masquerading as a couch, I kept dousing myself with wine each time I sat down. By the end of the night, I smelled like a winery.
    My main mode of transportation was an enormous 1950s-era bicycle—bought at a Goodwill. Henry offered to drive me home—it had gotten chilly. I declined, but he insisted.He stuffed the monstrosity into the trunk of his ancient uninsured Honda, but then the car didn’t start. At all. This was a relief. If he was trying to save me, it helped that he was