Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The next morning, Luc, still only in boxers, stumbled into his kitchen to find Marlow making pancakes. A lot of pancakes.
“So you don’t come last night,” he said, “with the invitation of my front door left open, but you come at six in the morning and make food?”
“I want to get Madame Belleville’s window installed. I need to do things.”
“I see that.” He took in her pancake flipping. Stirring fried potatoes. Popping the toast.
“What?”
“It’s just … a lot of glucides. I think you say carbohydrates.”
“This from a guy who buys a fresh baguette twice a day every day? You’ll eat it and like it.
Then we’re going to fix my shutters, and you have two loose, too.
The Mirabelle sign was ripped off in the storm.
Lali’s shed door was torn off its hinges.
There’s a second coat to paint in the house.
And I have to pick up transfer papers from Rémy. ”
“Did something happen?”
“Oh, nothing except that my daughter, who was supposed to be with Aubin’s friends in Neufchateau, is actually in Paris with my ex. Her asshole father. Something she and Aubin dreamed up. She lied about where she was going.”
“They are teenagers, no?”
“Technically. Sabine’s more like an adult in an eighteen-year-old’s body. Can’t speak for Aubin. I’ll wait until a decent hour, then call Yves and let him have it. Why didn’t he tell me she was there? I could have been worrying she was dead by the side of a road.”
“And what will this demonstrate?”
“My absolute right to be her sole parent.”
“Does he know you were in the dark about Sabine?”
That, she wasn’t sure about.
“Don’t make a bad situation plus grave. Don’t create story where there might not be any.”
Irritatingly good advice. She flipped a pancake with a hard thwack.
“I will eat your glucides,” he said, “and we will fix all the things in Mirabelle. Then you will be able to think clearly about what to do about Sabine and her father.”
“Fine. But I won’t like it.”
They were productive, fueled by Marlow’s rage and determination to get things under control.
They got Madame Belleville’s window reinstalled. To thank them, she made a huge lunch, which was impossible to refuse despite already being stuffed to the gills with Marlow’s carb breakfast.
They tried to eat as little as possible, unsuccessfully, as Madame Belleville, in a chatty mood, plied them with food and shared interesting details about the history of Mirabelle.
Just as Guillaume had explained the first day he’d shown Marlow the way to Maison Perdue, the area’s main industries were cabinet making and winemaking.
But Madame Belleville was adding a third: cheese—prize-winning, artisanal soft cow’s milk cheese, made on her family farm in the valley.
Mirabelle’s tiny houses, she said, were once populated by its workers.
Her Uncle Benoit, who lived next door and was what she called “un peu farfelu” (Luc translated—it meant a little daft), was the family company’s “chief innovator,” always trying new methods of cheese-making.
He won many prizes for their cheese, and one in particular: Mirabelle’s Brie de Loup.
“ ‘The wolf’s brie?’ ” Marlow asked.
Madame Belleville nodded. Wolves used to roam the valley and hills around Mirabelle until the 1940s.
Benoit had landed on a new way of making brie that he was excited about but didn’t have a name for.
One day, when Benoit was carrying a basketful of cheese along a worn path up the hill to the Mirabelle épicerie, he found himself face to face with a big wolf.
He thought his life was over—but instead, because he was un peu farfelu, he sat on the hillside and talked to the wolf instead, telling him all his problems, the most pressing of which was that he couldn’t think up a name for his new and wonderful cheese.
He offered the wolf a taste, and the wolf ate the whole thing—a giant round of it, rind and all—and then left Benoit alone.
So Benoit called his new cheese Brie de Loup.
It won many awards, and Benoit never told anyone about the process he used to make it.
Later, the cheese factory shut down, and most of its employees moved away, and the recipe for Brie de Loup died with it.
“Tenez,” said Madame Belleville, “vous en voulez, du fromage?” On top of everything else, she wanted them to eat cheese! And off she went back to the kitchen.
“This is the first time she’s said more than a word or two to me,” whispered Marlow.
“She’s picky about who she likes,” said Luc. “You seem to have passed the test.”
“Can we go so I can yell at Yves?”
“No. Here she comes.”
After lunch, Madame Belleville took them on a tour of the house and made them wear flat slipper-like towels made from flannel cloths over their shoes.
“To polish the floors,” said Luc, putting his shoes into the slippers, cross-country skiing across the floor. Since no one else seemed to find this funny, Marlow stifled a laugh, donned slippers of her own, and followed suit.
Madame Belleville explained how she had come to have the biggest house in town.
Back when Mirabelle was a going concern, her father, and his father before him, had been the magistrate.
The Rémy of the day, thought Marlow, mayor and lawyer in one, signing papers, running things, making people’s lives difficult or easy, depending on his temperament.
The house was sprawling. They polished their way through room after room of peeling paint, antiques, dusty chandeliers, porcelain basins on claw-footed stands, armoires filled with china sets, cracked ceilings with extravagant molding, side tables displaying old brass lamps with fringed lampshades beside Virgin Mary statues, shelving units lined with old books, maps, and children’s games, wooden crosses on the walls, hidden passages in the wallpaper that opened to secret servant quarters, grand hallways with worn Persian carpets and still-life oil paintings in carved wooden frames, and rows of closed, unused bedrooms.
Up a circular set of stone stairs with a rope for a banister just like Marlow’s was a huge attic, which Madame Belleville called a grenier, filled with rubbish and old planks of wood.
Down a ladder was a basement with low ceilings, a dirt floor, and an old bread oven.
Madame Belleville had been one of nine children; her parents were dead, all her siblings had moved away or died, and no surviving family member wanted the house. She couldn’t bear to leave it, but it was too much to manage.
She spoke to them entirely in French. To her surprise, Marlow understood almost all of it. They got out of there with enormously full bellies and casserole dishes of food.
“She likes you,” said Luc.
“How can you tell?”
“You were the recipient of, how do you say, the leftovers.”
Yves had to edit the footage from the shoot. It was good he was out, because Sabine didn’t want to explain that she’d lied to her mother about where she was, or that she’d had an epic fight with her the night before. She paced the apartment and couldn’t settle into anything.
“What if my mum calls him?”
“We’ll deal with it,” said Aubin. “It’s understandable why you’d come to Paris under the covers.”
“I think you mean undercover. Under the covers means something else.” She smiled cheekily at him. His eyebrows raised as he got the picture.
“Marlow doesn’t like Yves, but you’re allowed to have a relationship with him. And you suddenly find yourself in the same country as him. It was, I don’t know, fate to visit him, no?”
“I don’t want to hurt her. It’s true that he was never around. But she hates him so much. I have to wonder how much of that was him and how much was her, you know?”
She looked out the window. The city was alive. “You OK if we stay a few more days?”
He smiled. “We’ll need clothes.”
For the next week, Marlow distracted herself from wanting to reprimand Sabine in an obnoxious but warranted series of five hundred texts or hauling ass to Paris to let loose on everyone.
In the mornings, she worked to get Mirabelle back to rights.
It had been so run-down when she’d arrived five weeks ago, and like any good camper, she was determined to leave the campsite in better shape than she’d found it. Luc was all in.
Their attempts to get the electricity up and running were fruitless.
Their village had been all but forgotten, and it took repeated phone calls from Luc, Lali, and Marlow, standing in the Mirabelle square for its spotty service, to get someone out to repair the wiring that had been torn down by a fallen branch.
That was a test of Marlow’s French, complaining to a call center representative.
She wrote down the appropriate vocabulary Luc gave her and kept saying the same phrases over and over, remembering to kill with kindness.
Merci, Monsieur this, and Bien s?r, Monsieur that.
It took telling a call center supervisor that poor Madame Belleville, the only one in the village whose house was big enough to have a chest freezer, had had to cook every frozen piece of meat she had, because it was all thawing.
She was in her eighties, Marlow pleaded.
What would she eat after all this food was gone?
The supervisor promised to send someone by the end of the week.
Marlow pumped her fists in the air and told Luc that, at this rate, she was powerful enough to get them internet and cell service in Mirabelle, too.
“If you manage that,” he said, “I will bow at your feet and kiss them and perhaps every other inch of you, and I will never let you leave this place, ever.”
“Tempting,” said Marlow. And it was. With each tiny victory, she could feel herself adhering to the village and its five other inhabitants.