My Grape Escape Read Online Free

moment, Madame Germain. They tend to have an agitating effect. ”
    Franck nodded and gave me a wink.
    “You know what they say here in Burgundy?” The Doctor’s brown eyes met mine and twinkled.
    “ Quoi ?”
    “Nothing makes the future look so rosy as to contemplate it through a glass of Chambertin ." He stood up and ushered us out. The village church bell was chiming eleven o’clock. “I think that was our wise little Napoleon who said that. If only the state would reimburse it, I would write several prescriptions for Chambertin a day.”
     
     

     
     
    When I got home I felt, for the first time in months, back to my old self. So much so that I didn’t want to take my little pill, but Franck threatened that if I didn’t follow the prescription he would phone Le Père Dupont and my father to rat me out.
    Franck’s parents didn’t have any Chambertin on hand, so I took my evening pill along with a glass of lovely Savigny-les-Beaune Les Guettes made by one of Franck’s many uncles. I lay dozing in a lawn chair after dinner. The setting sun lit up the wisteria from above; summer air caressed my skin. Yesterday the world had seemed like a small, black room but now, with some help from the wine and Docteur Dupont’s pills, it became a place of endless possibility.

 
    Chapter 3
     
     
    I had never thought enjoying a cherry tarte outside under the wisteria would be such a challenge. It was all the fault of the cherry pits. Mémé, Franck’s grandmother, was the one who had baked the tarte and it was her steadfast belief that cherry pits should be left in the fruit.
    “It is the only way to get the best flavo u r!” she explained to me in loud tones that carried into the living room where Michèle, Franck’s mother, had retreated.
    “There’s nothing that annoys me more than picking the pits out of a cherry tarte, ” Michèle riposted. “Besides, they add nothing whatsoever to the flavour.”
    When our lapin à la moutarde and a half round of Cîteaux were sufficiently honoured, Mémé strode back into the kitchen to get her tarte . She presented it with great flourish and cut everyone a large slice. It looked delicious and I was determined, now that I was feeling better, to savour every pleasure I encountered on my daily path.
    Mémé began to chew hers with sounds of ecstasy that were unmistakably aimed at her daughter. Michèle, meanwhile, picked each pit out of her mouth with a grimace and lined them up disdainfully, like a row of suspects, on the napkin beside her plate.
    The silence between mother and daughter made the dappled sunlight of the table under the wisteria feel like the Gaza strip. Franck plowed through his piece unperturbed. Franck’s father André, meanwhile, polished off his slice in record time and excused himself to go into the house to do the dishes. My gaze shifted nervously from Mémé to Michèle. I took another wary bite and tried to chew as though I was enjoying it…but not too much.
    After lunch I climbed up to Franck’s room and flopped on the duvet. Through his skylight clouds gamboled past in a blue sky, blissfully unaware of the cherry pit storm still brewing below. I picked up the bottle of pills Le Père Dupont had prescribed me that were sitting on the miniature wine barrel serving as a bedside table. The prescription said to take one or two more a day in times of anxiety. Did this count? I put the bottle back down. The stressful things that happened outside of me were nothing compared to the stressful feelings inside my own head. I would save the pills for those.
    My thoughts drifted to my husband, who was undoubtedly now working his way through a second or maybe even third piece of cherry tarte , his digestion unperturbed by the tension around the table. A few minutes later Franck bent down and made his way through the tiny opening to his garret of a bedroom. He came down and sat beside where I was still lying.
    “Is the anxiety back?” he brushed the hair off my