The story of the shop was part of its appeal. Nearly every customer had heard about the pie crust made with butter and olive oil, about the baker who wanted no women but took as apprentice a young girl. Yet no tale would make Emma an expert. Talent was but one ingredient in a lengthy recipe. She knew enough to make mastering the basics her first goal. Also she continued to pay attention, interrupting herself midtask to watch Uncle Ezra whisk sugared cream of tartar violently into a gentle meringue, or fold one batter into another to make a third, new thing. Soon enough she began to intuit how to apply basic principles in new circumstances. She started to improvise, baking raisin muffins, adding a flourish to frostings, making sauces and reductions for Odette’s café.
One Christmas Eve—Emma was nineteen, taller than Uncle Ezra, more confident every day—she stood in the shop doorway beside him, helping distribute the fabled sticky cinnamon rolls. They had shared the work equally: him baking, her toasting the pecans, him kneading the dough, her blending brown sugar with butter to make the glaze, and both of them pouring the sweet nectar over finished rolls for the village children with so much care it could only be an act of love. He gave the treats on squares of wax paper while Emma kept track, making sure no clever boy managed to get himself more than one.
Up skipped the Monkey Boy, whistling and wearing an elfin cap. His mother prodded him to say thank you. “Happy Christmas, Aunt Emma,” he said.
“Never,” she shouted, surprising herself. “It will not be.”
She turned and bolted back into the shop. Uncle Ezra frowned at the tray of rolls in his lap, then groused at the next child to hurry along. Emma did not speak of it until she sat with her father and Mémé that evening at Christmas dinner.
“I will not become Uncle Ezra,” she declared, balling her hands into fists.
“Of course not,” her father said, but then he coughed into his sleeve.
“You have vastly more talent,” said Mémé, which Emma felt missed the point entirely.
After the big meal she met Philippe for a stroll on the sea path, along which young men and women had meandered since the time of the Romans. The ocean lay flat in December cold. Three large vacation homes on the bluff sat dark and empty, as if the windows were scanning the horizon for summer’s return. Below, a retreating tide seethed against the beach.
“I will not become Uncle Ezra,” she said. Philippe was trying to kiss her neck but she squirmed out of reach. “I refuse to be solitary for all of my life.”
“And what if you are?” he teased. “You will always have a score of admirers, as long as you make that raspberry trifle.”
“Oaf,” she said, giving him a swat. “I will be alone and you will laugh.”
“Of course you will not be alone,” Philippe said, going suddenly still. “It is out of the question.”
“It is not out of the question.” Emma stamped her foot. “I am working his early hours. I am slaving in his shop. I am learning his skills as if they were devotions. Yesterday I spent whole minutes deliberating between two eggs, trying to decide which one suited a recipe better.” Emma’s breath rose as a cloud in the darkness. “For seven years I have skipped down this path like a foolish schoolgirl, without a single moment’s foresight that I could wind up in the exact same life. What is to prevent that from happening?”
He took both of her hands. “I am.”
With that, she calmed. Emma accepted his kisses, allowed him to pin her against a tree trunk, and as an immodest Yuletide gift, permitted one of his hands a brief entry within the folds of her cloak. His fingers were cold against her waist and her skin surprisingly warm.
Mémé disliked Philippe because she thought he was short. In fact he stood an average height but Grandpère, her husband, had been nearly two meters. As Emma’s father, Marcel observed how quietly the young man talked, wondered whether a repairer of engines by trade could support a family, and kept any opinions to himself. He had married against his parents’ wishes, their pressure and ire serving only to drive their son away. When they refused to attend the wedding, the break was permanent. Therefore Marcel vowed on his late wife’s soul that whatever his reservations, he would not inflict that suffering on his daughter. She could give her love to an octopus and he would not object.
Emma, however, knew things her family did not: Philippe listened to her as attentively as she did to Uncle Ezra. While other boys pawed at their girlfriends without respect, Philippe walked with a hand around her waist only when they were alone. Emma was serious to a fault, whereas he laughed and his eyes became dangerous. When she confessed one day that she could not remember her mother’s face, Philippe held her close and his hands did not wander.
Afternoons, he met Emma after work at the bakery and leaned near. “You smell like sugar.”
“Go away,” she laughed, but gave him her knuckles to kiss.
The sole time he felt fickleness from her came when they encountered the Goat. Philippe could not help wondering what history was between them, that the sight or scent of that young man some days made her ardent, and other days turned her temporarily into stone.
Philippe had been eleven when his family moved to Vergers, and her enmity was already fully established—as was the Goat’s perpetually lingering, apologetic presence.
Emma refused to tell the story. A tale in which one is mortified does not bear repeating. However, that is not the same thing as saying the events never occurred.
He did not call himself the Goat, of course. Didier desired to be known as the Wolf. That was the title he invented for himself, instructing villagers, insisting that people elsewhere knew him by that name alone. Which people? Which elsewhere? Emma knew he was no traveler, with friends in other places, merely a farm boy gone adrift, no more wolf than she was field mouse.
Kinder villagers were indulgent, though, and called him the Wolf in his presence. Behind his back was another matter. From adolescence on, Didier had sought to be manlier than his nature. It always backfired. He volunteered for the national army, only to be dismissed for weak eyesight. He attempted to join the fishermen, but injured his back hauling a loaded net. He tried to grow a beard but it came in thin and only on his chin. One afternoon at the weekly town market, Odette joked that perhaps Didier had no onions, and Emma wisecracked that he looked like a goat. The gossiping biddies cackled and the nickname stuck.
Once upon a time, however, Emma and Didier had been classmates, their mothers dear friends. Yet he teased her all through childhood, and not playfully. He pulled her hair, stole her papers, called her names. One day his mother sliced her thumb while butchering a leg of lamb, and the resulting infection killed her in a fortnight. Adolescent Emma found that the funeral and sympathy made Didier oddly interesting.