Claudine looked at me for one second and then back at him. This was horrible. I had tried and tried to get Sébastien to tell her over the phone, or tell her sometime while I was hiding somewhere else, say in the Louvre.

“You’re moving across the world?” she said. “Now?”

“In a couple of months. I want to do a full year at my job.”

Her mouth worked. “Mon père, ma mère, et maintenant mon fils.” My father, my mother, and now my son.

“Maman,” Sébastien said. “I’ll still be there. Just over the telephone.”

She flexed her shoulders, then brushed her hand across her eyes with a hard shake of her head, and put her glasses back on. “So”—she smiled at us—“that will be fun for you, won’t it? To see a little bit of the world? But what will you do there? How will you live? Do you speak English well enough?” Her eyes opened very wide. “How will you manage to organize the wedding here while you’re over there?”

There was a long, uncomfortable silence. Sébastien said nothing. He was not happy with the solution we had come up with. “I think we’ll have to get married in the U.S.,” I said finally. “There’s a forty-day residency requirement for marriages in France, and it would be hard to reestablish that in time to get married next summer, if we spend the school year in the U.S. Plus, in France you have to publish banns and all kinds of things.”

Claudine just looked at me. After at least a full minute, she turned her head to look at Sébastien. Then, stiffly, back to me. She knew whose fault this was. She said almost nothing the rest of lunch and barely touched her crêpe. Claudine could force smiles and chatter in the worst of situations, so I knew things were bad.

“Well, that’s that,” I told Sébastien when we finally escaped, my crêpe sitting like so much glue in the bottom of my stomach. “Your mother’s going to hate me now. Wait until she tells the rest of the family; they’ll probably never even speak to me again.”

Twenty-five