“You shouldn’t be feeding her that,” Jean-Charles told him, coming in with grout-spattered hands and heading straight for the beers in the fridge. He and Bruno were laying the tile in the upstairs common room. “You might kill an American with that kind of thing. What she needs to try”—he reached up for another jar on the same shelf and brought it down with a thump to the table—“are my cherries.”

He fished a couple out by their stems, proffered one to me, and ate the other with relish. I popped mine into my mouth and collapsed at the table in a fit of coughing. “What proof alcohol did you use on these?” I asked, my eyes streaming. “Is that even legal?”

“Nice and strong, aren’t they? I’m going to make another couple of jars with some of the mirabelles, too,” he bragged. “Here, go ahead; have another one.”

I grinned at him. The need to impress my in-laws was fading somewhat with familiarity. As we worked together on the wedding preparations, they were feeling more and more like . . . well, like my family. And you don’t have to impress your real family, do you? “I don’t know. Did you ever eat a second one of those habanero peppers I brought back for you?”

“I’m getting around to it,” Jean-Charles said defensively. “I just haven’t figured out what wine to serve with them.”

Mamie set the last of the dishes aside and picked up the zucchini from the garden, giving the dirt on it a distressed look before she plunged it into the water. “That smells delicious,” she mentioned, glancing at the fudge shyly as Justine and I poured our batches into separate pans.

I looked up from scraping the pot and surprised a gleam in her eye. “You like chocolate?” Well, almost everyone liked chocolate; my concern was that no one here seemed addicted to it, like me. My French in-laws continued to embarrass me with their restraint toward sweet things.

“Oh-ho!” Titi laughed. “Does she like chocolate? You don’t know what you’re asking.”

A blush climbed up Mamie’s round face. She fidgeted with her eyeglasses.

“You can lick the pot and spoon,” I promised.

Her eyes met mine, I grinned, and she grinned back like a little girl. She was French, and I was American; she was over sixty and I was under thirty; like her son, she probably thought vinegar was edible in undiluted form; and we definitely didn’t understand each other on how many times a dish had to be washed. Nevertheless, chocolate could bridge all gaps, cultural or otherwise. I didn’t scrape the pot quite as clean as I could have before I handed it and the spoon across to her.

“Oh, I shouldn’t,” she said.