I stopped dead and tried to back out of the room but unfortunately bumped into Sébastien. “Oops,” he muttered in my ear. Then out loud, perfidiously, as if he hadn’t discovered this calamity himself the hard way a year ago, “You can’t get beer on Sundays, Laura?”

Three men rose up on the bed like the wrath of God. “We thought the cashier was crazy—”

“She kept picking our beer up and setting it back in the cart—”

“Saying, ‘No Beer Sunday, No Beer Sunday!’”

“Then we tried to go back and get wine—”

“And no, not that either!”

“No Wine Sunday!”

“So then we went to another store so we wouldn’t have to deal with any religious fanatics—”

“They said the same thing!”

“And there wasn’t anything but beer and wine in the whole store, they didn’t even have any alcohol, so what were we supposed to do?”

“Is your country completely nuts?”

“And that left us with nothing to drink for the whole day! We could have died! Jean-Charles almost had to drink water!”

“Fortunately, a couple of hours later, we hit on the idea of getting a cup of coffee instead.”

“We were at this lake where we’d been paddle-boating around—”

“And we went to the little refreshment stand, and—”

“No coffee,” I said, resigned.

“You knew?” Bruno flexed his hands.

“Well, you could have gotten coffee other places! Of course you can’t expect them to have it in a little lakeside refreshment stand!”

“Yes,” Bruno said, “we can.”

“Actually, I’m not sure it’s fair to let them think they can get coffee other places,” Sébastien stipulated. “Most of the time, that isn’t what they would call coffee.”

“You told us this was a developed country!” Jean-Charles exclaimed. “Well, all right, Sébastien never went that far, but still, we expected the fundamentals. Not only do you not have any good wine, but you’ve outlawed it on one day. No Beer Sunday. I couldn’t believe it.”

“So the next day we had to buy three coolers and fill them up with ice and beer because God only knows what you’ve done to the other days of the week. We barely had enough room in the cars for Bruno’s luggage! We had to throw out some of the cereal we bought at Super Wal-Mart! Have you ever tried the Oreo cookie ones?” Titi added to Sébastien, briefly distracted.

“Well, the whole country isn’t like that,” I proffered weakly. “You can buy beer in other states on Sunday.”

“Then why didn’t you get married in another state?”

“I’ll never understand American government. You can change something as important as that according to what state you’re in?”