This Place of Wonder (2)

“Hello?”

“Hi, Meadow, it’s Kara.” The restaurant manager. Her voice is hushed. Dull. I press my hand to the middle of my chest, feeling as if I’m the one having the heart attack.

“So it’s true,” I say before she can. “He’s dead.”

“Yes. I just wanted to be sure you knew, and see if you want me to handle anything any particular way.”

“Meaning?”

“There was someone with him.”

“A woman.” I don’t know why I’m surprised, after all this time, all his infidelities, but I am. It is unexpectedly painful.

“Well, she can’t be more than twenty-two.”

I would bet a million dollars I know which one. I saw her the other day when I went to deliver some produce—a tall, lean beauty with a perfectly flat belly and breasts like Venus and, of course, acres of long hair. His thing. So cliché. “The new bartender?”

“Yep.”

I set the phone on my dresser and press the speakerphone so I can get dressed. “Damn. Obviously she’ll have to talk to police, but give her a bonus of $5,000 if she’ll sign a nondisclosure agreement to keep her from talking to the press.”

“Done. What about the restaurant?”

“Closed for the week until we can sort things out. We can discuss when to reopen once we figure out the logistics of everything else.”

“Got it.” Kara is an enormously competent woman in her early fifties, square and solidly built, and has run P&P for a decade. “Funeral? Do we know those details?”

This sinks me, and my legs turn to rubber. I sit on the chair, airless, looking out toward the fields, rows of rare squashes and heirloom tomatoes shining beneath the nearly full moon. “No funeral or memorial. He wants to be cremated and scattered over the Pacific.”

“Mmm.” She takes a breath. “We might want to do something for the employees in a couple of weeks.”

I nod, still unable to stand. A fine trembling moves beneath my skin, forehead to shoulders, down my back and chest, my arms and legs, as if I’m freezing. “We can talk about that.”

“Once they release the body, where should it go for cremation?”

I frown. “Release the body?”

“Yeah. Cause of death is unclear, so the coroner has to do an autopsy.”

“Norah said a heart attack.”

“Not clear. The girl said he was weak and fainted.”

This visual brings a wave of pain down my spine. “I saw him just last night,” I say, and even I can hear my voice is hushed. “He seemed fine. He hasn’t been sick, has he?”

“You know Augustus. He would work with an amputated arm and swear he was fine.”

I breathe in, slowly, aching in every part of my body.

“Are you okay, Meadow?”

“No. But I will be. How about you?”

“Not really.”

We sit, linked by the connection, and stare at the atomic-size hole that’s been blown through both our lives. As I contemplate the future, it seems slightly possible that without him, the world will simply stop turning. Finally I say, “I’ve got to go. Norah is hysterical.”

“All right. Talk in the morning.”

In the darkness, I hold the phone in my palm, wondering how to break the news to my daughters, Rory and Maya. Especially Maya, who is two weeks away from finishing rehab. Will this derail her completely?

Finally, I get myself together and head for Belle l’été, the house where I spent twenty years building an empire with my ex-husband. A house I loved and hated leaving. A house where a woman who will have to go now lives.

It gives me no pleasure that he was cheating on her, too.





Chapter Two


Norah


I wait for Meadow in the middle of the night, under a moon that is almost brutally bright, sitting on the balcony of the bedroom I shared with Augustus, smoking actual cigarettes, which are not the same as vaping, no matter what anyone says. I smoke one after another until my mouth tastes like tin and there’s not enough water in the world to get rid of it.

Augustus is dead. I can’t get my mind around it.

Damn it. Fresh grief and shock move through my gut. For once I’d found something I thought I could call my own, a man who worshipped me from the first moment we met, a man who swept me out of my hardscrabble life into the elegance of his own, into his Spanish-style mansion overlooking the ocean, into a world where I didn’t have to worry about my next meal. It was like one of the white paperback romances one of my foster mothers used to read by the hundreds. I never believed it could happen in real life.

I light another cigarette. Inhale, blow it out hard, watch blue smoke rise in a cloud against the moon.

I didn’t come to California for Augustus, actually. I came to find Meadow.

Her book changed the trajectory of my life. I knew I wanted to write, and I’d majored in gender and women’s studies at the University of Pennsylvania, on a full-ride scholarship. I was a good student—one of the best—and not because anyone had given me much of a leg up, but because I worked my ass off. At the end of my junior year, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do.

I found Meadow’s book purely by accident, wandering through the food memoirs and histories at a favorite bookstore near campus, House of Our Own Books.