The Long Way Home (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #10)

by Louise Penny

Turmoil shook loose all sorts of unpleasant truths. But it took peace to examine them.

But he was also Armand. Her friend. Who’d come here to retire from that life, and all that death. Not to hide from the sorrow, but to stop collecting more. And in this peaceful place to look at his own burdens. And to begin to let them go.

“You forced me to give you poisonous gifts,” she quoted from her famous work. I can put this no other way. Everything I gave was to get rid of you As one gives to a beggar: There. Go away.

She shifted her seat and shoved the thought aside. After spending most of her life scanning the horizon for slights and threats, genuine and imagined, she knew the real threat to her happiness came not from the dot in the distance, but from looking for it. Expecting it. Waiting for it. And in some cases, creating it. Her father had jokingly accused her of living in the wreckage of her future. Until one day she’d looked deep into his eyes and saw he wasn’t joking. He was warning her.

Sometimes the only way up is down. Sometimes the only way forward is to back up. It seemed that was what Peter had done. Thrown out all he knew and started again. In his mid-fifties. A brave man, thought Clara.

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat. A sense of wrong,” Gamache continued the quote. “A homesickness, a lovesickness.” Ruth glared at him over the rim of her cut glass tumbler, one she’d found in the Gamaches’ home. “You know the quote,” she said, cupping the glass between two scrawny hands. “Not one of mine, as you know.” “Not even a poem,” said Gamache. “It’s from a letter Robert Frost wrote to a friend describing how he wrote.” “Your point?” “Is the same true for any work of art?” he asked. “A poem, a song, a book.” “A painting?” she asked, her rheumy eyes sharp, as though a barracuda was staring at him from the bottom of a cold lake.

“Any real act of creation is first an act of destruction. Picasso said it, and it’s true. We don’t build on the old, we tear it down. And start fresh.” “You tear down all that’s familiar, comfortable,” said Gamache. “It must be scary.” When the old poet was quiet he asked, “Is that the lump in the throat?”