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
No one alive could be outdoors and not sweat, even in the shirtsleeves or sundresses into which everyone had changed. In the deepening dark, humid as only a Southern night can be humid, fireflies came out all around in the forest, and we lit tiki torches filled with citronella oil to keep away the mosquitoes. Crickets sang all around us. Everyone sank onto giant, unsplit logs under a magnolia tree, around the Nice-inspired fountain. No one could have found the remotest resemblance between this setting and Nice, but I had a strange sense of coming full circle, or maybe spiraling back around, not closing the circle but coming back above an old event as the spiral continued. French and Americans talked back and forth to each other in languages the other didn’t understand. Mary Kay had brought out her Spanglish and seemed to be doing quite well with it.
We were married, I thought. We still had the French ceremony to do to seal both cultures into the deal, but we were married. I leaned back against Sébastien, who was beaming like a fool, and just felt happy. I would wait until tomorrow to think about whether I could handle a second wedding on top of this one without going stark raving mad. Maybe we should have had the French wedding first and the Georgia one second; if I had exploded under stress with my family, they would have taken it in stride as normal behavior.
Around eleven, David grew deeply concerned that anyone should drive in his condition. He declared himself over the base of a red oak stump that came up to my shoulders and his navel, his podium decorated with empty magnum bottles, plastic cups, a Brita water pitcher, and a cooler of ice. “NO DRIVE.” He shook his head and open palm emphatically to emphasize the NO. “Jean-Charles, NO DRIVE.” He elaborately nodded his head yes: “Claudine—drive. Bruno, NO DRIVE. Titi, NO DRIVE. Gaëlle—drive.” Pointing at himself: “David, NO DRIVE. Annette—drive.” He gave that some thought and repeated: “David, NO DRIVE.”
I picked up the water pitcher to refill it, and David got distracted briefly from the No Drive lecture. “You know, Laura”—he wrapped me up in a bear hug—“I love you. And I like Sébastien, I really do. I don’t know if he realizes I like him because sometimes I can come across kind of . . .”
“Oh, no, David,” I mistakenly tried to reassure him. “Sébastien really likes you a lot. In fact—”
David stopped that nonsense by holding up an open, impatient palm, bigger than my head. “I don’t care if he likes me or not. I just want to make sure he knows that I like him.”