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Chapters (45)
  1. Cover
  2. Blame Iton Paris
  3. Copyright Notice
  4. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  5. Book One
  6. One
  7. Two
  8. Three
  9. Four
  10. Five
  11. Six
  12. Seven
  13. Eight
  14. Nine
  15. Ten
  16. Eleven
  17. Twelve
  18. Thirteen
  19. Fourteen
  20. Fifteen
  21. Sixteen
  22. Seventeen
  23. Eighteen
  24. Nineteen
  25. Twenty
  26. Twenty-one
  27. Book Two
  28. Twenty-two
  29. Twenty-three
  30. Twenty-four
  31. Twenty-five
  32. Twenty-six
  33. Twenty-seven
  34. Twenty-eight
  35. Twenty-nine
  36. Thirty
  37. Thirty-one
  38. Thirty-two
  39. Thirty-three
  40. Thirty-four
  41. Thirty-five
  42. Thirty-six
  43. Thirty-seven
  44. Thirty-eight
  45. Thirty-nine

Children skipped among the gyrating adults: a vivacious métisse child with soft, dark curls, who danced with every single person on the floor; a tiny redheaded girl who attached herself to Sébastien, thumb in her mouth and head tucked down to stare up at him with enormous blue eyes. Whenever she shot her arms straight up at him, Sébastien would laugh and pick her up to dance with her in his arms until she wanted down again. A very sketchy adult male gyrated among the children, too, repeatedly attempting to bump and grind Justine and her even younger-looking cousin until Jean-Charles, Titi, Bruno, and Sébastien turned on him en masse. Sébastien passed the redhead to me, and I carried her away from the scene to her mother. When the sketchy man persisted, it looked very like we were going to have a fight right there, but the mayor’s husband finally ordered him to leave. It was midnight by then, and the stars were bright overhead, as they never were in Paris.

I would miss this place and these people, I thought. Well, maybe not sketchy males, but everyone else. I really would.

“Your wedding’s going to be just like this.” Claudine smiled at me.

“Including drunk men who try to grab parts of your body, probably,” Sébastien muttered, glowering. The loss of his little dance partner had wounded him deeply.

I seized Sébastien’s hands. “Let’s do it,” I said. “Let’s have two weddings, one in the U.S. in July, and one in August, here. It will be fun.” I really said that. And I wasn’t drunk, I swear.

Sébastien spun me around the dance floor, he was so happy. I stumbled the first steps and then caught up with him, laughing as we whirled around.

Twenty-six

I was halfway over the Atlantic before I realized I’d been had. Sure, the PACS sounded wonderful, and the village festival had been great fun. Who wouldn’t want to have a wedding with two days of dancing and feasting under the stars at a stone farmhouse built before my country was born? I had, however, forgotten one essential difference between those two events and our wedding feast: in the first two cases, someone else had done all the work. Caught up in the excitement, I had agreed to throw two big weddings on two different continents exactly five weeks apart from each other. Was it just me, or did that sound suicidal? “Does that sound suicidal?” I asked a recently married friend in the U.S. She handed me her therapist’s business card.

“Does that sound suicidal?” I asked my sister Anna.