“At least you won’t have the same trouble I did with visas and work permits,” I said, to focus on something positive. I had memorized a lot of patriotic poetry when I was younger and considered myself an expert on my own country.

“I can believe that. No bureaucracy could be as bad as the French one.”

“Right. And we’re talking about America here. We’re much more open to immigrants.”

Hey, that’s what it said on the Statue of Liberty.

We went to see his mother for lunch to tell her. She was upstairs in the pharmacy where she worked. A green neon cross glowed above the automatic glass doors. We slipped past the little metal turnstile, the pristine shelves full of medicines, the mother and child waiting to fill a prescription, and up the stairs to Claudine’s apothecary. Women moved around in white medical coats down to their knees. Machines and counters filled the maze of small, old rooms. The floor of this ancient building smelled of medicine and, richly and thickly, of herbs. The open window in Claudine’s workplace looked down on a small stone courtyard. Big antique containers from apothecaries of a century or more ago filled the shelves above her main counter, blue and green ceramic jars with golden stoppers, marked with names of plants in Latin. Several white ceramic mortar and pestle sets, of various sizes, spread across the counter.

“I’m just finishing up,” Claudine said. “Look, Laura, I’ll show you how I make pills.” She filled a bronze mold of hundreds of half-capsule shapes with yellow powder and slipped it in a machine. There was a stamping sound and she pulled it back out, flipped the fresh-minted yellow pills out onto a counter, and counted them into a plastic container.

“You make the medicines here?” I asked.

“It depends on what it is. Some medicines come already in their packages, but we’re known for being one of the pharmacies in Paris that still prepares things from scratch.”

The malpractice suit potential in that boggled my mind. This was really a different country.

We went to a little crêperie around the corner, a small quiet restaurant in tones of yellow, with paper place mats. Over bolées of cidre doux, clay cups without handles filled with a yellow-orange froth of cider, Sébastien told her. “I’m going to move to the U.S. with Laura.”

Claudine stared at him for a long moment, a slight crunch to her eyebrows, as if his words were slowly being deciphered into something meaningful by clumsy machinery in her brain. All at once, tears filled her brown eyes and spilled over. She ripped off her glasses and wiped them away, turning her head away from both of us. Hand pressed against her cheek, she stared out the window, half hiding her eyes. She didn’t say a word.

“For a year, I think,” Sébastien said.