Only a couple of logs still glowed red in the fireplace, and heat still escaped from the dining room’s Benjamin Franklin stove. Everyone was already home for Christmas and asleep, but they woke up bright and early the next day and filled the house with loud voices and uncontrolled boisterousness from one end to the other. I’m the sixth of seven children. All the females in my family had turned out really small and all the males really tall, except for my father; he had passed genes for gianthood on to his sons but been trapped eight inches smaller than they by polio when he was seven. We all had big voices, though, and knew that the only way to make ourselves heard was to just keep talking and get louder. Everyone usually participated in at least three conversations at once, while our mother wailed that we were giving her a headache and why couldn’t one person talk at a time.

Introductions went tentatively. I could tell my brothers were making a real effort, in spite of the earrings, because they didn’t shoot Sébastien and they even kept speaking to him. I’m sure Sébastien was making an effort, too, because he hid the fact that he didn’t understand a word spoken in that molasses-and-music drawl. I would have liked to help out and translate for him occasionally, but my oldest and biggest brother, the alpha wolf, stopped that in its tracks. “No French,” he barked.

I glared at him. “Don’t you think you’re being just a tad xenophobic?”

“No.” David folded his arms over his enormous chest smugly. “I don’t like people saying things I can’t understand.”

Sébastien started out his before-dinner, Christmas Eve presentations with the cautious gift of a corkscrew. “Now, I was sure you all had one,” he lied, “but this is a style I really like.” It was a nice piece of work, too, with the simple elegance of a tool with one purpose in life: no frills, no experimentations, only the best. My father and brothers, who routinely compared their latest Swiss Army knives and Leatherman tools when they got together—some kind of phallic ritual, I guess—passed this corkscrew from hand to hand. In their eyes, I saw a first gleam of appreciation.

And I noticed something else. All twenty people in my rambunctious family had gathered near the table to watch. No one was saying, “Let’s eat already,” and no one was wandering off to the bathroom or lingering in the living room over a game of chess. I hadn’t even had to herd them to make a good show. I had just said, “Sébastien brought some wine for dinner.”

The last two bottles I had snuck at great risk through customs had been slipped onto my brothers’ wine racks and never commented on again. I scowled.