He glared at her.
“Kids need a lifeline. He might be a lost cause, but it’s worth a try. Sometimes it takes just a little help. Look, I’m an outsider. I don’t have any authority here. But maybe if you talk to his father, tell him he’ll be coming here to work it off...”
“Hand me the damned phone.”
“Remember how you told me you didn’t have a phone that first night?” she teased as she grabbed the old-fashioned landline. It had a cord long enough to cross the kitchen.
“Didn’t want to be bothered. Besides, there was no one to call.”
Cady smiled as she watched him look up the number, running his gnarled finger down a long list of handwritten names and numbers in a battered old address book.
She imagined the “C” section of his address book was full indeed.
• • •
Cady was perusing the limited fish selection at the grocery store when the cashier, Annick, waved her over.
“If you are looking for fish you should buy direct from the trout farm. It is a business that has been run by the same family for generations. There’s a lovelyfromagerieon the way there as well.”
Cady bought the rest of her groceries and followed Annick’s directions down a winding mountain road along the river. She arrived at a clutch of stone buildings, one of which was clearly a large private home, with picture-perfect lace curtains in the windows and a fat cat lazing on the porch in a shaft of April sunshine.
Inside the shop, a plump, red-faced woman greeted her with “Ah oui,you are the American staying at the château?”
Word had spread.
“How is Fabrice doing?” asked the woman. “I hear he hurt his ankle.”
“He’s doing better, thank you. I’ll need two trouts for our dinner.”
“The fish here is very special, you know,” the woman said as she used a large net to scoop a wriggling trout out of the tank, laid it on the table, and knocked it out in one smooth move. Cady grimaced and focused on the view of the emerald green river through the window. It was fun to think about buying fish at the source, but Cady was most definitely a city girl, more comfortable with buying meat under plastic at the market.
“The river Sorgue comes out of the belly of the mountain in Fontaine-de-Vaucluse. Not a small spring, mind you, but an entire river, flowing just like that, out of the rock. This is why it is always very cold, even during the hottest summers. No one knows where it comes from; no one has been able to reach the bottom.”
Cady remembered Jean-Paul mentioning the town; Fabrice’s “Minette” was from there, and supposedly it had been home to a dragon, once upon a time.
“I’ll take a pack of smoked trout as well,” Cady said on impulse, as the woman handed her a bag along with a small piece of paper with a recipe fortruit Provençal,made with classic herbes de Provence.
Next, a “quick stop” at thefromagerieturned into a forty-minute tasting odyssey, as the cheesemaker introduced her to the localfromages. A goat cheese called Banon was small, round, and pungent, wrapped in chestnut leaves and tied with raffia. Another, Brousse du Rove, was consideredpetit lait, and came in tall little tubes covered in woven wicker.
She splurged, buying two of each, in addition to a wedge of Roquefort, a small round of Camembert, and a jar of onion compote.
Back home in Oakland, Cady hadn’t been one to give in to impulse. But she was in France, after all.
• • •
Cady carted the groceries into the kitchen and found Fabrice in his favorite chair in front of the fire. Despite railing at the doctor’s advice yesterday, he had been following directions, putting his ankle up and icing it frequently throughout the day.
“How’s your ankle?”
“A little better, maybe,” he said, watching her unpack. “Where’d you get all that?”
“From an amazingfromagerieon the way back from the fishery.”
He glared at her. “Only idiots buy atfromageries.”
“I never claimednotto be an idiot.”
“Speaking of idiots, Johnny will come after lunch.”
