He nodded elaborately, looking around at the crowd of family and new family all gathered in the humid night. “You know when I realized Sébastien was a good guy? Now this might seem to you a kind of—I don’t want to say a crude reason but a”—his hand was making low, as-far-as-he-could-stretch-it-still-standing gestures toward the ground, rock-bottom—“a—a—”

“Primitive?” I suggested. “Basic? Fundamental?”

“I don’t know, but you see what I mean.” He made some more of the rock-bottom gestures. “Was when I took him out to shoot that shotgun with us.”

I blinked at him with profound respect. I remembered Sébastien outshooting him, but that David could admit his real reason for liking his French brother-in-law out loud, without a trace of self-mockery, gave me new insight into what it meant to be a man’s man. A real man, you know, from the South.

“And he did all right on the shotgun, you know; he was hitting some . . . but then”—respect leaked into his voice—“I handed him a pistol, a kind he’d never even shot before, and I lined up some bottles out there. I told him we’d each start from the outside and see who got to the middle first, and—he hit ’em.” He nodded, reliving the moment. “And I said to myself right there, a man that can pick up a weapon he’s never shot before, and shoot with it, shoot like that, well, he’s a good man. A good man. I guess you’re going to say that seems silly, but—you got a good guy.”

Thirty-one

When my sister got married, she and her new husband went off together to Costa Rica and spent a week exploring active volcanoes, swinging from trees in rain forests to explore their inner baboons, and sharing other romantic adventures. She got married to an American, but that probably has nothing to do with it. When my best friend got married, she and her new husband chose New Orleans for five romantic days in a bed and breakfast with lots of lace and dogs. She married an American, too, but that’s probably just coincidence.

Nevertheless, I mentioned the coincidence as we were driving to meet Sébastien’s family in Savannah, where they had preceded us because we had lingered a couple of days to clean up the mess left from the wedding.

“That’s funny,” he said. “The first time I got married to an American, I had to spend two days in the freezing cold with her brothers, digging through this god-awful red substance you people call dirt, to fix a septic tank.”

“Okay,” I said, “now you’re getting off the subject. What I’m trying to say is—”

“How much nicer and more relaxing it will be to travel around with ten of my family for a week,” he beamed. “I know. I’ve missed them.”