“I should probably try to keep a clear head if we’re going to talk wedding plans,” Sébastien said. Sébastien was so happy to be back in France he could hardly stand it. He kept looking around and taking big gulps of air.

Jean-Charles nodded sagely and poured him a glass of vin de noix, the homemade green-walnut wine his father had sent up from Provence. “I had a hard time thinking straight on what they serve in America, too. Especially on Sundays.”

The weather was hot and clear, a good augury for the outdoor wedding feast. In the year since the fête villageoise, the garden had grown less ragged. The gnarled and disheveled look that still lingered only added to its charm. Prickly, crackling weed life crowded against the wire fence marking off Titi and Bruno’s two acres, and beyond that stretched fields of fading golden wheat stubs. “Don’t worry,” Claudine told me. “I got plenty of sheaves before they cut it.”

“Hmm?”

“Farmers don’t mind if you cut just a little. We stopped along the edges of different fields and took only the most beautiful sheaves. It will be perfect to decorate your wedding.”

I brought my gaze back from the fields and stared at her. Claudine wore snazzy black capri pants and a black spaghetti top, both of which fit her slender self like a glove. Gold circlets sparkled in her ears, a sapphire gleamed in the hollow of her throat, and she waved a cigarette in one hand, a glass of Riccardi near the other. She looked far too elegant to be talking about stealing wheat sheaves or using them to decorate anyone’s wedding.

“Wheat is for good luck,” she explained, while I tried to fit wheat sheaves into my idea of wedding decorations. “Ça porte bonheur. You’ve got to have it. And I’ve already bought all the silk flowers and ribbon in your colors.”

I swallowed my orgeat, a Provençal mixture of water and syrup of bitter almonds that no one else drank; Titi and Bruno had added its components to the liquor cabinet especially for me. “That’s wonderful. Thank you so much. I don’t meant to pry, but what are my colors?”

“I’ll show you,” she said happily and disappeared into the farmhouse, coming back with a plastic bag. She reached into it with the triumph of a magician grasping rabbit ears and pulled out silk flowers and ribbons in a dark, intense blue and an extreme sunflower-yellow.

For a country that seemed to think gray and beige were flashy colors, let me just say that these were a jump. The blue I could figure out, since everyone knew I liked blue. I was infamous for it. I had trouble with the yellow, though. “That’s a . . . particularly nice shade,” I said. “Vivid.”