“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 ofglucides. 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 Neufchâteau, 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 situationplus 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 yourglucides,” 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 theway 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 Mirabelleépicerie, he found himself face to face with a big wolf. He thought his life was over—but instead, because he wasun 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.
