I smile. “Annie can show you how to prep the batter for the blueberry muffins,” I say. “But don’t feel like you have to help. I’m perfectly fine on my own.”
“I didn’t say that you were not,” Alain says. I raise an eyebrow at him, but he has already turned around to let Annie help him tie on an apron.
“So, like, if Mamie was so in love with Jacob, how come she married my great-grandpa?” Annie asks Alain once he turns back around. He grabs a bag of sugar and the flat of plump blueberries that Annie has pulled out of the refrigerator. “She couldn’t have loved him too, right?” Annie adds. “Not if Jacob was her one true love.”
I roll my eyes, but truth be told, I wish I still believed in the concept of one true love too. Alain seems to be considering the question as he pulls out a big bowl and a wooden spoon and begins mixing sugar and flour. I watch as he measures in salt and baking powder. Annie hands him four eggs, and he sets to work cracking them in.
“There are all different kinds of love in this world, Annie,” he says finally. He glances at me and then back at my daughter. “I have no doubt that your great-grandmother loved your great-grandfather too.”
Annie stares at him. “What do you mean? If Mamie was in love with Jacob, how could she also, like, be in love with my great-grandpa?”
Alain shrugs and adds some milk and sour cream to the bowl. He mixes vigorously with the wooden spoon, and then Annie helps him fold in the blueberries. “Some kinds of love are more powerful than others,” Alain finally replies. “It doesn’t mean they aren’t all real. Some loves are the kind we try to make fit but are never quite right.” He glances at me, and I look away.
“Others are the loves between good people who admire each other’s souls and grow to love each other over time,” he continues.
“Is that what you think Mamie and my great-grandpa had?” Annie asks.
Alain begins carefully lining muffin tins. “Perhaps,” he says. “I do not know. There is also, Annie, the love that all of us have the chance to have, but that few of us are wise enough to see or brave enough to seize. That’s the kind of love that can change a life.”
“Is that how Jacob and Mamie loved each other?” Annie asks.
“I believe it is,” Alain says.
“But what do you mean you have to be wise enough to see it?” Annie asks.
Alain glances at me again, and I pretend to be busy filling a tray full of miniature Star Pies. My fingers shake a little as I form the lattice crusts into star shapes.
“I mean that love is all around us,” Alain says. “But the older we get, the more confusing it becomes. The more times we’ve been hurt, the harder it is to see love right in front of us, or to accept love into our hearts and truly believe in it. And if you cannot accept love, or cannot bring yourself to believe in it, you can never really feel it.”
Annie looks confused. “So you mean Mamie and Jacob fell in love because they were young?”
“No, I believe your great-grandmother and Jacob fell in love because they were meant for each other,” Alain replies. “And because they did not run from it. They were not scared of it. They did not let their own fears get in the way. Many people in this world never fall in love that way, because their hearts are already closed, and they do not even know it.”
I slide a tray of Star Pies into the smaller oven on the left and wince as I carelessly smash my hand against the oven door. I curse under my breath and set the timer.
“Mom?” Annie asks. “Did you love Dad that way?”
“Sure I did,” I say quickly, without looking at her. I don’t want to tell her that if she hadn’t been conceived, I never would have married her father. It wasn’t a love for him that made me create a family; it was a love for the life growing inside me.
But what had Mamie been thinking when she met my grandfather? She’d believed, apparently, that she’d already lost Jacob, and somewhere along the way, she’d lost the child she was carrying. Her life must have felt tremendously empty. Had loneliness driven her into the arms of my grandfather? How had she been able to lie beside him at night, knowing that she’d already had—and lost—the love of her life?
“So how come you got a divorce then?” Annie asks. “If you loved Dad like that?”
“Sometimes, things change,” I reply.
“Not Mamie and Jacob,” Annie says confidently. “I bet they always loved each other. I bet they still love each other.”