We didn’t get the visa problem sorted out by the time the July wedding came around. We did, however, reach an interesting stage: Sébastien wasn’t yet considered a legal resident of the U.S. but still had to pay a hundred dollars and make a request two months in advance in order to leave it and visit the country of which he was a legal resident. His work permit arrived the third week of June, after he had spent eight full months trying to fill the gaping holes in his life with freelance work and classes. By that time, we had been living on one salary for a year and a half, with student and credit card debts up to our ears, and I couldn’t even look at bridal magazines; if I read one more article on frugal brides who whittled their wedding bill down to twenty thousand dollars, I would start shooting everyone involved in the bridal industry. Our weddings would be homegrown.

We spent a lot of time on the fourteen-hour round-trips between my teaching job and my parents’ house. The approaching wedding and presence of French people made my parents decide that many things let go for decades needed to be fixed in the next few months. We spent Spring Break ripping out the concrete of a fountain that had not functioned in fifteen years, digging several feet deeper through hardened Georgia clay, and rebuilding a new version of the fountain. Early birds, my father and I often found ourselves digging on it together in hours so young that no one else even noticed they existed. Around eight, Sébastien would come out and set to as well, breaking the clay with a pickax, sinking the shovel in, hauling hundred-pound rocks away, and then hauling them right back to the same place they had started in when my sister and mother changed their minds and decided they looked decorative.

“Your fountain,” my father kept calling this project, as if I’d gotten everyone into all this trouble. I preferred to think of myself as the victim.

“It could hardly be mine,” I finally said. “You first built it when I was a baby.”

“But I built it for you.”

I paused with my shovel thrust the inch I could get it into red clay. This was a story I didn’t know.

“I went to France when you were just fifteen months old, and I saw this beautiful fountain in front of a museum, I think it was in Nice. I was sitting there drinking orange juice because it was the only thing I could figure out how to order when this couple walked across with their little daughter, about your age. And I thought, ‘What am I doing here in this strange country when I could be home with my baby daughter?’ So I gave the little girl my orange juice, went home, and built a fountain for you.”