Chapters (45)
- Cover
- Blame Iton Paris
- Copyright Notice
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- Book One
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Book Two
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
How sweet, I thought. David kept trying to share his culture with Sébastien, too. And he did it exactly the way Jean-Charles had shared snails with me, with a grin and a challenge. “Not me,” I said. I appreciated the gesture, but David liked to be in trouble, something an eighty-ton crane facilitated. I had clear memories of the time he had put his wife in a tree for fifteen minutes and pretended the crane had broken so that he couldn’t get her down.
“Me,” said Sébastien, who had, after all, already drunk Mad Dog today and lived. He climbed into the makeshift seat. “Now get a good grip,” David said. “Here, Dana, you want to swing him?”
“Dana?” Sébastien said, as David’s little blond eleven-year-old daughter climbed up into the cab, took the controls, and raised him six feet off the ground.
“This is why we never bothered to fix that old swing at the house,” she explained, grinning, and rotated the superstructure of the crane. Sébastien swung in a slow arc thirty feet to one side, rose above the rooftop of David and Annette’s business, and then dropped back in a long sweeping glide of sixty feet to the other side. By the time Dana ended his ride ten minutes later, Sébastien was grinning from ear to ear.
“Hey, Say-bas-tee-YON, do you want to learn how to control the crane?” David called. Of course, Sébastien did. “Now it’s real simple, Say-bas-tee-YON. You just do this, this, and this. All right, Dana, your turn. Hop in the swing; Say-bas-tee-YON is going to swing you.”
Thus Sébastien learned how to operate an eighty-ton crane, its boom stretched to 175 feet, with his instructor’s eleven-year-old daughter dangling from one end of it.
“Laura,” he said afterward, “I’m glad you told me Americans were normal, so that I would know.”
Due to the aftereffects of Christmas dinner and having twenty people in the house, the septic tank broke down during the night before December 26. No one was allowed to use running water the morning of the fake wedding, including the bride.
I sat down in the kitchen and did what I like to think any normal person would have done in those circumstances. I began to cry.
“Oh, honey, now . . .” My dad looked alarmed and retreated until his back pressed against the counter.