The next day we went to see the grandparents, both released from the hospital and back at their own home, in the village near Paris where all their friends lived. Pierrette looked paler and older, but she was moving around fine, while René seemed wasted by the chemotherapy. He had only a few wisps of hair left. He was very tired, and yet there was something still spry in his eyes. When we drove up, he was polishing an old car with his sweatshirt sleeve. Jean-Charles had gone down to Provence soon after the diagnosis to pick up one of his classic cars, a beige and brown Citroen C4. He had made the slow journey back up to Paris, several careful, thirty-mile-per-hour days of driving in a car built in 1931. All along the way hotel owners took their cars out of private garages to make sure his could be kept safe, in order to let Papy, René, keep the car in his garden storage house. Nothing was ever spoken about this. Jean-Charles said he just wanted to have the car around him, and he appreciated his wife’s father letting him use his garage for storage. But everybody knew why, as we saw Papy tenderly buffing the round rim of a headlight.

Papy and I, we ride together in the back of this 1931 car, in style, lavender sprigs tucked by his head in one of the old-time potpourri holders, as we make our way by backroads from the grandparents’ house to Titi and Bruno’s huge, old stone farmhouse for a get-together. I’m not sure why I get to be the one to ride with him; maybe just because I love those old cars so much, and they all spoil me. The moment holds too much. He knows, as we do, that his life has been leeched out of him, so suddenly and so completely. But his eyes are sparkling with delight, and he bounces on the rear seat of that old car. Riding like a king.

Twenty-four

A week after the snail lesson, I was back in immigration offices. Progress had been made, though: I could actually rest my chin on today’s counter while wearing flat shoes.

“Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” said the woman on the other side of it. “Your employer was skimming 16 percent off your salary?”

“That’s right.”

“Did you talk to them about it?”

“Of course.” Well, it had started out as talking. “But they said tough luck and if I protested they would get my visa revoked.”

“They can’t do that,” said the woman, outraged. When you pit a company and an employee against each other, the average Frenchman automatically reacts on the side of the worker, even an immigrant worker. It’s one of the reasons there are so many strikes.

“That’s what I thought. But it’s okay, I’ve already found another job.”