Free The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted by Bridget Asher Page B

been hard on all of us—not only missing Henry, but facing the idea that your whole world can change, suddenly, irreversibly. We were reminded how flimsy everything is, as frail as the airmail envelopes my mother had sent us the summer she disappeared. This is the life you have and then it’s gone. I felt sorry for my mother. I knew what it was like not to be able to help your child, to change the incomprehensible randomness of life, to reverse a loss. But she had a plan. She was being valiant. “Come to brunch,” she said. “Let’s just talk.”
    hildren. For all of the times that you miss out on things you’d like to do because of them, there are an equal number of excuses they offer to get out of things you’d like to miss.
    “Abbot is exhausted,” I said to Elysius and Daniel. “I’ve got to get him to bed before he passes out.”
    Abbot was revved up on cake, Shirley Temples, and chocolate cubes. He could have gone on indefinitely. I was the one who was exhausted. I was fairly sure that my sistercould tell I’d been crying. My makeup had been all but erased, and my eyes were probably still red-rimmed. But she didn’t say anything about it, for her own sake, maybe, but also for mine.
    It was dark now. There were small white lights strung around the tent like glowing beads and larger spotlights propped at the edges. The guests were still here, talking and laughing, the sign of a good party. Elysius looked tired but happily so, gorgeously so, and Daniel had kicked back at a table littered with purses and waning bouquets.
    “Thanks for staying so long,” my sister said without any hint of sarcastic subtext. She’d gone soft with all the displays of affection and really was forgiving me.
    I accepted it immediately. “I wish I could stay longer. It was a beautiful ceremony and a great party.”
    The wind was kicking up now, a strong breeze.
    “It might rain,” Daniel said, looking at the distant sky.
    “It’s allowed to rain now,” my sister said, like a small god. “My work is done.”
    And so Abbot and I headed back down the sloping lawn toward the studio. If his father were here, I thought, he’d carry him into the studio, up the stairs, and into bed. Did Abbot remember times when Henry had lifted him up from the backseat of the car after a long night? The scratchiness of his coat, the smell of his aftershave? Every child deserves that memory. I had my own: my father walking along the narrow walkway up to our front door, boxed by hedgerows that my shoes brushed against as we made our way, and he wouldhum a tune I didn’t know, the low register of his baritone vibrating from his chest to my cheek.
    Abbot was too heavy for me to carry, and so we walked along, hand in hand, and I became painfully aware, as I often did, that I was lucky to have Abbot. I could have been walking down this slope alone. Without the responsibility of Abbot, how would I have managed to go on? But this was something that Henry and I had wondered when we were still together, too. How had we managed to find life meaningful before Abbot?
    Abbot was a surprise, or, well, a kind-of surprise.… We finished culinary school and were both dizzily working, he in an upscale, high-pressure restaurant, I in a bakery. We both wanted to have a child but knew the timing wasn’t right. We had student loans. We wanted to save up to buy a house. We would take turns telling each other that rational people wouldn’t have a baby now. It wouldn’t make sense. It would be foolhardy, but this struck me as fool-
hearty
. “Fools of the heart,” I said. “Fool-hearty.”
    Henry was the one who finally came out with it. “Why don’t we have an accident?”
    “You mean you want to knock me up?” I said.
    “Accidentally,” he said.
    “But if I know about it, wouldn’t that be on purpose?” I said.
    “This isn’t a question of logic. Let’s be fool-hearty.”
    Instead of practicing safe sex, we practiced accidents. We got good at it. One