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

been looking but really I’d been just waiting for
him
without knowing that I was waiting, really, without knowing that I’d been missing him before he arrived. Ithought he was the answer to the longing I’d felt at thirteen. I thought the ache was a restless lonesomeness, but it was more like homesickness for a place you haven’t yet come to.
    In my sister’s kitchen, I was remembering our first kiss, the feeling of being pressed up against the door, the sound of the keys as they fell from my hand, jangling, and hit the cement stoop. There were so many hours, days, weeks that blurred from one moment to the next and slipped by. I wasn’t good at the daily. I was lousy at cherishing the moment. It turned out that my longing was part of who I was. It had subsided, but then—especially the year before Henry’s death—it returned. It got in the way of my ability to appreciate the details of my daily life. That’s what Henry did so well while I longed.… How could I have been so careless? Why didn’t I pay closer attention?
    I was homesick in my sister’s kitchen, on her wedding day. I wanted to go home, but the home I longed for, with Henry, was no longer there.
    “Let’s get your father and Abbot together. They can keep each other busy until the wedding starts,” my mother said loudly over the kitchen noise. She’d managed not to smear her makeup while crying; it was one of her skills.
    She pointed to my father, who was wearing a navy suit and sitting in the corner of the breakfast nook, penciling numbers into a book of Sudoku. This was how the ex-workaholic now handled the passage of time. Sudoku was a point of contention between my parents, and my father had to do it on the sly. Sudoku was a putterer’s thing to do, andmy mother hated puttering. But my father was drawn to detail work, the intricacies that he’d found fulfilling as a patent lawyer. He liked categories within subcategories within subcategories. He talked a good game about his adoration of invention, but truth be told, he enjoyed rejecting claims for “indefinite language.” Deep down, I think my father had wanted to be an inventor, but he ended up a legalistic grammarian, a keeper of language.
    Abbot looked at me mournfully. He loved his grandfather, but he didn’t want to be abandoned in the noisy traffic of the kitchen. Plus, there was something inherently demeaning about being pawned off, and he knew he was being pawned off.
    “You two are buddies,” I reminded him. “You’ll keep each other entertained.”
    We walked over and my father looked up from his Sudoku. “Well, don’t you two shine up nice?” he said. “How do, Abbot?”
How do
was one of Abbot’s baby expressions. He’d been a very social baby, asking everyone all day long how they were doing—baggers, bank tellers, librarians.
How do? How do?
    “I’m good!” Abbot said, putting on a happy face.
    “Maybe you two can watch a television show in the den,” my mother said.
    My father glanced at her, gauging her emotion. I assumed he could tell she’d been crying. “Sounds good! Let’s get out of the way of all this pomp and circumstance.”
    “There’s a Red Sox game on,” I said. Henry had been sucha die-hard Red Sox fan that it was Abbot’s legacy, nearly genetic, and now it was my sole responsibility to make sure that he got hooked. I’d bought him all kinds of paraphernalia—ball caps, T-shirts, a pennant pinned to his door, curling in on itself like a dying corsage, as if even the Red Sox pennants needed New England’s chill and this one was wilting in Tallahassee’s humidity.
    “There’s also a show on whales today,” Abbot said. “Whales have retractable nipples. They’re mammals, like us.”
    “Baseball players are mammals, too!” my dad said.
    “But they don’t have retractable nipples,” Abbot explained, undeterred.
    “They don’t,” I admitted. Abbot is a very smart kid, and in the world of kid-logic, he’d won this argument.