The Love Season by Elin Hilderbrand Read Free Book Online

other. Should she feel bad that she hadn’t selected a Sancerre to drink with the tart and a lusty red to go with the beef? It was grossly unorthodox to drink champagne all the way through a meal, though Marguerite had done it often enough and she’d noticed any person in the restaurant who was brave enough to do it. But really, what would her readers in Calgary think if they knew? Champagne, she might tell them, was for any night you think you might remember for the rest of your life. It was for nights like tonight.
     
    Her hands were full, true. She had a pile of things to do at home: The aioli, the marinade for the beef, and the entire tart awaited, and Margueriteheld out hope for a few pages of Alice Munro and a nap. (All this exercise—she would pay for it tomorrow with sore muscles and stiff joints.) But even so, even so, Marguerite did not head straight home. She was out and about in town, which happened exactly never and she had done so much thinking about…and if she had really wanted to escape her past, she would have moved away. As it was, she still lived on the same island as her former restaurant, and she wanted to see it.
    She lumbered down Main Street and took a left on Water Street, where she walked against the flow of traffic. So many people, tourists with ice-cream cones and baby strollers, shopping bags from Nantucket Looms, the Lion’s Paw, Erica Wilson. Across the street, the Dreamland Theater was showing a movie starring Jennifer Lopez. Marguerite harbored a strange, secret fascination with J.Lo, which she nourished during her daily forays into cyberspace. Marguerite surfed the Internet as a way to keep current with the world and to combat the feeling of being a person born into the wrong century; she needed to stay somewhat relevant to life in the new millennium, if only for her Canadian readers. And cyberspace was alluring, as addictive as everyone had promised. Marguerite limited herself to an hour a day, timing herself by the computer’s clock, and always at the end of the hour she felt bloated, overstimulated, as though she’d eaten too many chocolate truffles. She gobbled up the high-profile murders, the war in Iraq, partisan politics on Capitol Hill, the courses offered at Columbia University, the shoes of the season at Neiman Marcus, the movie stars, the scandals—and for whatever reason, Marguerite considered news about J.Lo to be the jackpot. Marguerite was mesmerized by the woman—her Latin fireworks, the way she shamelessly opened herself up to public adoration and scorn. Jennifer Lopez , Marguerite thought, is the person on this planet who is most unlike me . Marguerite had never seen J.Lo in a movie or on TV, and she had nodesire to. She was certain she would be disappointed. After a second or two of studying the movie poster (that dazzling smile!) she moved on.
    Down the street, still within shouting distance of the movie theater, on the opposite side of Oak Street from the police station, was a shingled building with a charming hand-painted sign of a golden retriever under a big black umbrella. THE UMBRELLA SHOP , the sign said. FINE GIFTS . Marguerite’s heart faltered. She ascended three brick steps, opened the door, and stepped in.
     
    If what the girl wanted was the whole story, the unabridged version of her mother’s adult life and death and how it intersected with Marguerite’s life and how they both ended up on Nantucket—if that was indeed the point of tonight—then Marguerite would have to go all the way back to Paris, 1975. Marguerite was thirty-two years old, and in the nine years since she’d graduated from the Culinary Institute she had been doing what was known in the restaurant business as paying her dues. There had been the special hell of her first two years out when she worked as garde manger at Les Trois Canards in northern Virginia. It was French food for American congressmen and lobbyists. The chef, Gerard de Luc, was a classicist in all things,