Invitation to Provence(2)

“Come, my children,” she says, smiling, for in her heart they are her children and they love her as her own real offspring never had. “It’s time to take action.”

She walks to her room, takes a seat at her desk. Louis flops against her, panting, while Mimi, attracted by her frivolous scarlet toenails, begins to lick her feet. From the drawer Rafaella takes the large square cream-colored cards with Chateau des Roses Sauvages, Marten-de-Provence engraved in dark blue. Then she picks up her pen and, in her now shaky script, she begins to write.





PART I





The Invitations





Passion is a malady. It’s dark.

You are jealous of everything.

There’s no lightness, no harmony.



—GEORGES SIMENON





1





WHEN THE INVITATION that was to change Franny Marten’s life arrived in her mailbox on a leafy Santa Monica street that last day of July, she didn’t even notice it. She was too worried about her long-distance boyfriend, Marcus. She was meeting him tonight. He’d said they “needed to talk.” “So talk,” she’d said, smiling into the phone, but then he’d said it wasn’t the right moment and besides he needed to see her. Now Franny was wondering nervously if there was something ominous in those words.

She was leaving Your Local Veterinary Clinic where she worked, and she turned her head as she always did when the glass doors shut behind her, just to check that her name was really there. It still gave her a buzz to see those hard-earned letters after it that said she was a qualified doctor of veterinary surgery, and it always tugged at her heart that her father was not there to see it, too. He would have been so proud of the way she’d handled herself after he’d died, leaving her alone in the world at age seventeen. He’d have been proud of her struggle to put herself through college and med school, working all those jobs, baby-sitting, cleaning houses, waitressing, any work she could get to make ends meet, and even then it had been touch and go.

Franny looked like the typically blond Californian, but she was still a small-town Oregon girl at heart. Ten years had passed since she’d driven down the coast in a junky old car with that newly earned vet license in her otherwise empty pocket, in search of a new life. That dream life included success in her new career and of course love and marriage, which would lead automatically to children and “a family.” She’d especially hoped for the family because it was something she’d never had. She sighed thinking about her dream. So far only the career part had come true. Still, maybe one out of four wasn’t bad.

She opened the door of her dusty white Explorer Sport, flinching as the day’s trapped heat wafted over her. Air-conditioning blasting, Kiss FM blaring, she gunned the engine and headed for Main. Of course the traffic was hell, but wasn’t it always? Stalled at the light, she flipped down her mirror and checked her appearance. Hot, un-made-up, blond hair dragged back in a fat, untidy braid. Purple smudges of fatigue showed under the long, narrow water-blue eyes, an asset she owed to her Norwegian mother. She looked awful and she knew Marcus would notice and comment on it because that’s the way Marcus was—he always found her weak spots.

Actually, other than the pale blue of her eyes and her blond hair and her name—her mother had been a great admirer of J. D. Salinger—Franny didn’t owe much else to her Nordic mother, who had simply left them for “better opportunities” when Franny was three years old. She died a few years later, and lonely young Franny had felt nothing at all except, when she was older, guilt for not caring. But her mother had been someone she’d never known, someone who had never wanted to know her.

It was different when her father died. Then she was devastated. He had been her friend, her supporter, the rock on which the burden of her life rested, and suddenly with a car accident all that was taken from her. Somehow she found the strength to get on with life the way they’d planned it, because that’s what her father would have expected of her. And what people saw when they met the nice small-town blond vet was not exactly what they got. There was a core of steel forged from hard times under that soft exterior. She’d needed it in order to survive alone in a big, tough world.

Sighing, she switched her thoughts to the beautiful German shepherd whose life she had—fingers crossed, hope, hope, hope, please God, I’m praying for him—saved today. Then she’d had the difficult task of trying to stabilize his distressed owner, a leggy L.A. girl in skintight gray biker shorts and a cropped T-shirt that showed her gold-stapled navel.

“It all happened in a moment,” the girl sobbed. “He just ran after a ball, the car threw him into the air, it never even stopped… . He’s all I’ve got.” And Franny had mopped her tears with Kleenex and comforted her with hot coffee and an arm around her shoulders. Soft-hearted, sympathetic, gentle, she was always ready to listen and to offer help, and she always gave that extra time, which simply left no time for herself. And which meant, of course, that despite Marcus’s complaints, after dinner she would make sure to go back to the clinic and check on the dog. If necessary she would be there all night. That’s just the way she was.

Fretting in the crawling traffic, she finally turned right on Montana, then left onto a leafy side street, stopping in front of the tiny 1930s Craftsman-style cottage that was her home. Her first real home. Well, hers and the bank’s anyway, and small though it undoubtedly was, after the dingy furnished rooms in grim, gray parts of town that were all she’d been able to afford when she was putting herself through school, to her it seemed like a palace.