Precious Gifts Read Free

forget her father, for an hour or two at least, until she had to call her mother and tell her that Paul had died. As the oldest of Véronique’s three daughters, the hard jobs always fell to her. Juliette was never up to them. And Joy had abdicated with her very separate life in L.A.
    —
    When Arnold called Juliette at her tiny sandwich shop and bakery in the Park Slope area of Brooklyn, she was right in the middle of the lunch rush that happened every day. Her shop, Juliette’s Kitchen, had been a hit since she opened it three years before. At her mother’s urging, she had majored in art history, and had gotten a master’s degree at the Sorbonne, only to discover, when she took classes at the Cordon Bleu in Paris “just for fun” when she finished, that baking was her passion. She made sandwiches on the irresistible croissants she baked fresh every day, and she also sold cookies, cakes, and pastries from recipes she had found in France. And her plans to become a curator at a museum, or to teach, went out the window after the Cordon Bleu. She was never happier than in the kitchen, peering into an oven, serving a mug of steaming coffee to an elderly customer, or pouring a cup of hot chocolate smothered in whipped cream for a child. It satisfied all her needs to nurture people, and her little sandwich shop had done very well. After a lot of discussion and some serious thought, her mother had lent her the money to start it, although she’d been very disappointed at Juliette’s abandoning her career in art. Véronique was still hoping Juliette would get over her baking passion one day. At twenty-eight, she was still young. Véronique wanted a more interesting and intellectual career for her than a sandwich shop, and Véronique had always loved the idea that Juliette had inherited her own passion for art, and Véronique’s father’s. It was in their blood. But Juliette had given up art for her croissants. And in the end, her mother helped her with the loan.
    Juliette was the softer, smaller version of her older sister Timmie. They were only a year apart and had been like twins growing up. But they were as different in character as night and day. Timmie and Juliette were green-eyed like their father, and Juliette had always been slightly overweight, but pretty anyway. Timmie was taller and thinner, Juliette shorter and rounder, with a womanly figure that had gotten bigger as she sampled her baking to test the recipes, and she had a spectacular bosom that Timmie always teased her about. She had long blond hair like Timmie, but hers had hung in a mass of ringlets as a child and was wavy now. Her hair was fair and natural and she looked beautiful when she wore it down, which she couldn’t do when she worked. She wore it in a braid down her back, with a haze of soft curls that always sprang loose around her face. Everything about Juliette was welcoming and warm, and she’d had a motherly quality even as a young girl. She wanted to take care of everyone. Timmie always said she collected all the lame ducks in the world, particularly if they were men.
    All of Juliette’s romances had begun because the men she got involved with needed a place to stay, money, or a job. They slept on her couch initially, wound up in her bedroom, and eventually wended their way into her bank account, where they indulged themselves for a while with Juliette’s help, and then after she had spoiled them liberally, they dumped her for someone else. According to Timmie, it had happened too often by now to be an accident—it was a pattern, and a bad habit. Juliette always managed to find handsome men like their father, who took advantage of her. There hadn’t been a good one in the lot so far, and they usually stuck around for about six months until they moved on. Juliette would cry for a while, take solace in her work, invent a few new recipes, and gain a few more pounds. Then some other guy in need with a broken wing would come along. She was a