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
I looked at our hands red from the same dirt we had been digging together. I could imagine the scene twenty-eight years ago. My father, young and thin and adventuring in a strange country, missing me, the little blond toddler I knew from pictures, then coming home and building a part of France for me. And here we were, father and daughter at 7:00 A.M., rebuilding this fountain for my wedding to Sébastien, himself now in a strange country. Moreover, I would be living between France and America the rest of my life. What had I been doing in a strange country when I could have been home with my family? I looked up the drive toward Sébastien, coming out of the house. What was he doing in this strange country when he could be home with his family?
“It’s funny,” Dad said. “I brought you that orange teddy bear you still take everywhere back from that trip, too. As soon as you got old enough to understand where it came from, you decided to learn French, to speak with it. You were always begging me to take you to Paris when you were little, before you got distracted by all the other countries you wanted to travel to. Isn’t it funny, what gets things started?”
Multiple trips from our apartment to my parents’ place had everything almost ready, and ten days before the wedding, we had the countdown days planned to a T, without any spare time for breathing or sleeping. Then my sister called. “You’d better get down here early. Mom and Dad just had two of the oaks in the yard cut down, and we’ll have to clear them away before the wedding.”
“What?”
“One of them dropped a branch a week ago. They were afraid another branch would fall on your guests and kill them.”
“What?”
“It’s possible.”
Once off the phone, I explained to Sébastien why we were leaving the next morning.
“What?”
“Trees,” I repeated, precisely. “My parents decided to cut down a couple of trees.”
“What?”
“Trees.”
“Why would they decide to do that a week before the wedding? We don’t have enough work to do already?”
“They were afraid a branch would fall on your family.”
Sébastien gazed at me. “Didn’t you and your six brothers and sisters run all over those woods every day for two decades? Odds are good my family could survive a couple of hours there without getting decimated by falling branches.”
“They brought out some tree expert last week after a branch fell. He said the trees had to be cut down; they were rotten and would start to kill people right and left if my parents didn’t remove them.”
“Did he say they had to be cut down a week before a wedding?”
“The guests,” I reminded him. “Your family’s safety.”