They did hesitate, but only for a fraction of a second. After all, in a strange country, advice from natives was not to be sneezed at. They poured sugar onto the mess of steak sauce and grits.

“Now that’s what I call traveling,” Jacky said when we left. “Enjoying the local specialties, meeting indigenous peoples . . .”

“And all this time we thought we’d be eating hamburgers and fries for two weeks,” Jean-Charles said. “You know, your country’s cuisine has unexpected creativity.”

“They always like things so sweet in America, though,” Titi said. “Have you noticed?”

“Is there nowhere we can get a beer?” Bruno pleaded.

When we left them, it was after midnight, and they had not slept for three countries: Paris–Milan–Atlanta. We figured we would give them what was left of the night and the next day to recover from jet lag and rejoined them the next evening, after a day of wedding preparations finished with a little light wood-chopping. When the teenagers let us in, their hotel room furniture featured rows upon rows of soggy dollar bills in various stages of drying. “From when they threw each other into the pool,” Justine explained.

“What?”

“I think Papa started it, and then of course Bruno and Titi had to get him back.”

“The hotel clerk tried to get us to stop because it was 3:00 A.M., but they convinced him it was perfectly okay,” her cousin Julie added. “They didn’t get arrested or anything. That was later.”

We found Bruno and Jean-Charles playing tennis in the back parking lot beside the pool, where Claudine, Martine, and Pierrette all sat. Martine and Claudine turned their faces to the sun and baked, Martine’s straight red hair spilling over the lounge chair; Pierrette sat under a parasol, covered in a hat and layers of cloth.

“I know where you can find beer here, Laura,” Jean-Charles said, backhanding the ball to Bruno. “So you’ll know in the future. Gas stations, which I find just a bit strange. You know, your country’s not as puritan as it makes out to be, is it?”

“Where did you get the tennis rackets?”

“Oh, those. You know, there’s the neatest store just across the road. Some kind of Karl-Marx or something like that.”

I looked down the road and spotted the Wal-Mart. “Did you even think about Jean Bové when you went in there? What’s the point of his spending five years in prison for bulldozing McDonald’s if you’re going to cave in to globalization and big business the second you set foot in America?”

“Yes, but you can find everything there.”

“Explain to me how you got arrested.”

“Almost arrested,” Bruno said regretfully. “We never actually saw the inside of a jail.”

“We went into Atlanta,” Titi began.