In it lies the smallest dormouse from Madame Blanchard’s collection, the one I used to hold while she read me British stories as a child. Is it even a dormouse? I become unsure. I have called Madame Blanchard’s figurines dormice since I was little: but really, this one is some sort of unrecognizable meadow-creature with a longish nose. Might it be a tiny platypus? It has a tender aspect, and as it rests in my hand I wonder if Madame Blanchard asked Suzette to keep it for me.

I sit on a bollard in the parking lot and wait for the courier. He has to go in and have Madame Thunay-Dufresne sign for the box containing the remains of Madame Blanchard. The funeral home calls it an urn, but it’s nothing more than a box made of waxed cardboard. It reminds me of the takeout Chinese food containers Sophie brings to the tent on Friday nights after she gets paid.

As I hold her remains I reflect that being with Madame Blanchard, even in her last years, always held some comfort for me.

Now her little house by the sea will change even more.

The thought of that house terrifies me all the way back downtown on the train with Madame Blanchard’s carton on my knee. I know the house became unlike its old self eleven years ago, when Madame Blanchard had to move out of it. Already, then, its roof groaned toward the stones and pineapple-weed. But now her ashes make it irrevocable: I can no longer pretend I might repair that house, or repair to any time before it fell derelict. The house and Madame Blanchard fell apart together, leaving me no shield against reliving war in Technicolor, all night, every day…alone in that house sagging into its field of rhubarb by our crescent beach and taking me down with it….Until, as August bled into September, I ventured down to the beach and met Sophie.

—

AS THE TRAIN CREAKS INTO Bonaventure Station I feel hungry—and am ashamed of the hunger. Why, when one is bereaved, do the animal humiliations persist? I feel starved, and want potatoes.

Wolfe’s first potato was at his mother’s house when he came back from Portsmouth at thirteen, thin, seasick and ashamed to have abandoned Cartagena, his very first campaign. I remember Betty made him a plate of magical whip—potato fluffed with milk. He’d never had it before. She sprinkled nutmeg on it. It revived him in a way he had not known food could do.

Is that truly what happened?

Even if Sophie makes fun, even if my memory is unsure, I can say with authority, if only from the times Madame Blanchard cooked potatoes for me as I came home from school, that a bowl of mashed potatoes with a square of butter swimming in the fork-tine furrows on top is restorative.