“First, I have an aperitif,” Sébastien said, breaking the wax seal and uncorking it with that no-nonsense smoothness I had appreciated when I first saw him and which my brothers watched with calculating admiration. I could see them anticipating exactly how many bottles they would have to open before they attained that smoothness.

I took a glass of the aperitif to be supportive but needn’t have bothered. Everyone of age in my family, and a couple of people who would have been of age in France and were too polite to correct Sébastien’s mistake when he served them, took a glass and exclaimed how good it was. Some even took seconds, and they stood around talking, sipping, and enjoying it just like French people. There was food on the table, and they weren’t rushing to eat.

I eyed Sébastien warily, hoping he wasn’t secretly seeing himself as some missionary among the savages, leading them to salvation. It would be about like a Frenchman to be entertaining that kind of fantasy among Americans.

Everyone greeted the wine he brought with equal enthusiasm, and Christmas morning over breakfast I found Stefan, the youngest and normally most reserved of my brothers, interrogating Sébastien in his most carefully pronounced English on how to choose wines.

“Y’all come up to our place tomorrow,” the oldest of my brothers said. He pointed his big, callused finger at me. “But no talking French.”

The road to his house hadn’t been paved over yet, and David’s gravel driveway was even longer than my parents’. By the time we reached my brother’s big, gray-blue house among the woods, Sébastien was looking at me thoughtfully: “Your family has problems with urban life, don’t you?”

“I told you Paris was too crowded.”

Once inside the shield of trees, a long lawn swept out to meet us. Up stone steps above the house, a white gazebo stood by a fishpond; beyond it lay herb and vegetable gardens. Rosebushes David had once planted with a construction crane curved up the drive. All of this was a winter ghost of its summer self, but still beautiful. We all credited such taste to David’s tiny, blond wife Annette, having no other possible explanation. We’d grown up with David, after all.

No sooner had we stepped out of the cars than David landed on Sébastien. “Say-bas-tee-YON!” he called. We hadn’t managed to persuade him to stop martyrizing Sébastien’s name and to use its English version like the rest of the family. “That’s not his name,” he had countered. “Say his name again, Laura? There you go; that’s what I’m saying.”