Elin Hilderbrand - The Love Season

Ella Fitzgerald. Marguerite felt like singing along, but even shuttered inside her own house she was too shy-what if her neighbors heard, or the mailman? Now that it was summer, he came at irregular hours. So instead, Marguerite let her hands do the singing. She covered the bread dough with plastic wrap and put it in the sun, she pulled out her blender and added the ingredients for the pots de crème: eggs, sugar, half a cup of her morning coffee, heavy cream, and eight ounces of melted Schraffenberger chocolate. What could be easier? The food editor of the Calgary paper had sent Marguerite the chocolate in February as a gift, a thank-you-Marguerite had written this very recipe into her column for Valentine’s Day and reader response had been enthusiastic. (In the recipe, Marguerite had suggested the reader use “the richest, most decadent block of chocolate available in a fifty-mile radius. Do not-and I repeat -do not use Nestlé or Hershey’s!”) Marguerite hit the blender’s puree button and savored the noise of work. She poured the liquid chocolate into ramekins and placed them in the fridge.

Porter had been wrong about the restaurant, wrong about what people would want or wouldn’t want. What people wanted was for a trained chef, a real authority, to show them how to eat. Marguerite built her clientele course by course, meal by meal: the freshest, ripest seasonal ingredients, a delicate balance of rich and creamy, bold and spicy, crunchy, salty, succulent. Everything from scratch. The occasional exception was made: Marguerite’s attorney, Damian Vix, was allergic to shellfish, one of the selectmen could not abide tomatoes or the spines of romaine lettuce. Vegetarian? Pregnancy cravings? Marguerite catered to many more whims than she liked to admit, and after the first few summers the customers trusted her. They stopped asking for their steaks well-done or mayonnaise on the side. They ate what she served: frog legs, rabbit and white bean stew under flaky pastry, quinoa.

Porter had pressed her to add a seating to double her profits. Six thirty and nine , he said. Everybody’s 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 back stairs ( Service stairs! Action’s voice cried out), brushing by Mr. Rogers, who was still intent on his acrobatics, and burst out the side door. Beautiful day.

“Hey,” a voice said. Renata whipped around. She had thought that she and the cat were the only ones home, but there, among the hydrangeas, was Miles, holding a hose.

“Oh, hi!” Renata said. She had been awed by Miles’s good looks when he came to fetch her and Cade at the airport, and once she’d acknowledged this attraction to herself, she was doomed to be tongue-tied in his presence.

“Where’re you off to?” he asked.

“Oh…,” Renata said. “I’m going running.”

“Perfect day for it.”

“Yep,” Renata said. She bent down and touched her toes; then she lifted her leg to the railing of the porch and touched her toes, hoping for a ballerina-in-a-Degas-painting effect, but she felt like a complete idiot. “What are you doing?”

“Watering,” he said, and then in a whispered falsetto he added, “the precious hydrangeas.”

“Are you in school?” Renata asked. He looked older than her but younger than Cade. Though maybe not. Cade could already pass for thirty.

“School?” Miles said. “No. I graduated from Colby three years ago.”

“So what do you do now?” Renata asked.

“Work my ass off for these people,” Miles said. “And in the winter I travel.”

“Travel where?”

“You name it.”

“Tell me where,” Renata said.

“I’ve been to South Africa, Botswana, Mozambique, Kenya, and Tanzania. I climbed Kilimanjaro twice in one week.”