“Chocolate is good for your health,” I answered. “Tons of studies say so.” The sugar in it wasn’t, but why quibble over details? Mamie delved in happily.

Sébastien, Justine, and I were outside setting up the oil-drum grills when the barking dogs alerted us to another of Sébastien’s cousins stopping by. Sébastien’s cousins had lost their novelty. It seemed like every single day another one popped up, black-haired and brown-eyed, and all of them looked horrified when they heard who our priest was. Even Sébastien was surprised to discover how many of his father’s side of the family lived in this barely populated ten square miles and how many of them had gotten in car accidents with the curé. Either everyone on Sébastien’s father’s side drove like a bat out of hell or the eighty-two-year-old priest did.

“So who are you getting to do the ceremony?” this cousin asked, sending his son off to play with the dogs while he watched us work. “Not that old grouch, Monsieur T.”

“Is he grouchy?” Sébastien heaved a concrete block out of the wheelbarrow and positioned it to form part of the base for a grill. There was no way around it, Sébastien had some fantastic muscles, I thought, watching them flex. “I thought he was just a bad driver.”

“You’re thinking of Mom’s car,” his cousin said wisely.

“Hers, too?”

“He ran straight through a stop sign at 140 kilometers an hour! She’d just bought the car two weeks before, and he totaled it. But that’s not the half of it, with that priest.”

“He seemed all right when we met him. For a priest,” Sébastien added with deep reserve.

His cousin shook his head in slow, elaborate appreciation as if we’d just told him we’d bought oceanfront property in Switzerland. “You know he’s the one who baptized my son. It was . . . I thought my dad was going to kill him.”

I had seen Sébastien’s father once and his uncles not at all; but I had gathered they were all giants, had all played rugby most of their lives, and apparently were all barbaric. Except for the darker hair and brown eyes, they sounded like my brothers. Still, murdering a priest was going a little far, I thought. “What did he do?”

“He refused to accept the godparents at the last minute just because they were atheists.” Sébastien and his cousin exchanged looks of disgust for such an intolerant old man.

I paused. “From a priest’s point of view, atheistic godparents would be a bit of a contradiction in terms,” I pointed out delicately. They gazed at me in blank indignation. “You see, traditionally, a child is given a godparent so that someone will look out for his religious development and make sure his parents don’t let him go to hell.”