B004MMEIOG EBOK Read Free Page B

odor in the same way that my daughter, Louise, and Jean-Marie’s daughter, Alice, bickering in the backseat, trailed perfume.
    Though clearly there existed a Christmas rich in goodwill, hospitality, and tidings of comfort and joy, thanks to my problems with the front door lock we were far from it. Instead of the Rush to Beat the Rush and the Rush itself, we’d got stuck in the Rush of Those Who Decided to Wait and Miss the Rush.
    A glacier of metal crept forward in centimeters. Every few seconds, sleet sloshed across the windshield to drool like freezing spit in a gelid slush down the glass. Jean-Marie’s thumb flicked the wiper control, but those few seconds showed us only the nearest cars filled with people as bored and irritated as ourselves. A man slogged past us between the cars, hands in pockets, head bowed, leaning into a storm speedily deteriorating into a blizzard. A driver whose motor had died? Someone desperate for a quiet spot to pee? Or perhaps someone not unlike myself, wandering a desolate Saint-Germain in search of a locksmith.
    Was that only two hours ago?
    The young locksmith had arrived within the hour and wasted no time rolling his eyes at the damage done by my torch. Before I’d finished explaining, he was unscrewing the lock.
    “Is nothing,” he said in approximate English. He was Spanish, maybe, or Portuguese; naturally no Frenchman would break into his Christmas. “If you close . . .” He mimed pushing the door shut. “ . . . is not possible open again with this lock. So some people . . . you know . . . to get out . . .” He mimed hacking with an axe. My melting the lock didn’t seem quite so stupid.
    “Do you know why it wouldn’t open?”
    “Sure.” He pulled the door open and pointed to scratches on the lock plate. “You see here, the . . .” He groped for the French word for “burglary.” “I think . . . a cambriolage ?”
    Somebody had apparently tried to break in. All they’d done, however, was ruin the lock, probably by breaking off a fragment of metal inside.
    I n the car, my mobile rang. It was Marie-Do.
    “What happened?”
    “He fixed it.”
    I didn’t mention what it cost—a little over $2,000. A few times as he worked, he answered calls on his cell phone and noted down addresses. Business was good. No wonder he agreed to work over Christmas. He probably spent the rest of the year in the Bahamas.
    “Where are you now?” she asked.
    The snow-swept darkness gave no clue. “Somewhere on the road to Richebourg. Traffic’s impossible.”
    “Everyone’s arrived. We’re just setting the table. What should we do?”
    “If we want to eat before midnight, the geese should go in . . .” I looked at my watch. Six o’clock. “Now.”
    “I can’t cook two geese!”
    “It’s not so hard. The others will help.” Even as I said it, I recognized the absurdity of this. My in-laws could burn water. “If I have to, I can talk you through it.”
    Marie-Do asked uneasily, “They don’t still have their . . . stuff ?”
    (In one of his comic books about the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Gilbert Shelton has the dumbest brother, Fat Freddy, roast a chicken.
    “This is good chicken,” say his brothers. “What did you stuff it with?”
    “Didn’t need stuffing,” says Freddy. “It wasn’t empty.”)
    “Their stuff has been removed. Promise.”
    “All right,” she said. “I’ll get a piece of paper.”
    “What for?”
    “The recipe.”
    And for the first time that day I really began to worry.
    Non-cooks have a touching faith in cookbooks. They think that if you have a recipe, it’s just a question of following the directions. But a cookbook is like a sex manual: if you need to consult it, you aren’t doing it right.
    “You don’t need a recipe.” I searched for a phrase that would reassure her. “They’re oven-ready.”
    “Really?” I could feel her suspicion.
    “Light the ovens, shove in the stuffing, put one goose in each oven,