It had been a restaurant called Peasant Stock, and they had both worked there. Like their marriage, though, Peasant Stock was no more. What did my mother feel, I wondered, finding herself a divorced woman with two young children to support in the exact same neighborhood where, so many years before, she had fallen in love? Sometimes at night, when my mother was still at the restaurant and I was home alone, I’d stare out of that window. I’d look down and try to imagine that building with my parents and their friends from when they were young. In my head, the scene at Peasant Stock was always a fine midsummer evening. Blue cheese and champagne grapes on a rustic cutting board, grappa flowing, everybody eating family-style. And my parents were still together. It was my father I had to thank for these details—the grappa, the blue cheese, and so on—those tiny touches that could flicker a vanished world back to life in a child’s imagination, for my father and never my mother used to tell me tales of Peasant Stock.
What do You think about Charlotte Au Chocolat (2012)?
