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Back Blame It on Paris Save as PDF
Chapters (45)
  1. Cover
  2. Blame Iton Paris
  3. Copyright Notice
  4. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  5. Book One
  6. One
  7. Two
  8. Three
  9. Four
  10. Five
  11. Six
  12. Seven
  13. Eight
  14. Nine
  15. Ten
  16. Eleven
  17. Twelve
  18. Thirteen
  19. Fourteen
  20. Fifteen
  21. Sixteen
  22. Seventeen
  23. Eighteen
  24. Nineteen
  25. Twenty
  26. Twenty-one
  27. Book Two
  28. Twenty-two
  29. Twenty-three
  30. Twenty-four
  31. Twenty-five
  32. Twenty-six
  33. Twenty-seven
  34. Twenty-eight
  35. Twenty-nine
  36. Thirty
  37. Thirty-one
  38. Thirty-two
  39. Thirty-three
  40. Thirty-four
  41. Thirty-five
  42. Thirty-six
  43. Thirty-seven
  44. Thirty-eight
  45. Thirty-nine

“You should have called,” I said weakly.

“Well, we felt we should manage to get out of Paris ourselves. Then, once we did, we couldn’t find a pay phone. Also, we didn’t know where we were, so we couldn’t have asked you for help from there to here anyway.”

“I hate French roads,” Sue said. “Profoundly.”

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Keeping in mind my father’s homily on strawberries to mend all ills, I offered them mirabelles and installed them in one of our freshly vacated beds. Jean-Charles and Claudine arrived as I came back downstairs, produce and meat crammed into every possible corner of Jean-Charles’s hatchback. He must have peered between a pineapple and a giant wheel of Brie de Meaux to see out, because food filled every space. “And this is just the first trip,” Jean-Charles said. “I have to go back for the rest.”

Fitting the meat alone into the refrigerators defied us for some time. No fewer than four different people approached me as we were unloading to make sure that cheesecakes absolutely had to be kept refrigerated. “Yes,” I said adamantly. “But I keep telling you to take out the fudge.”

They looked dubious. “Fug is chocolate. We don’t want it to spoil.”

We stacked the fruit and vegetables in the barn, behind the two classic cars that still needed to be polished for the wedding. At the temperatures we’d been experiencing since the mirabelle storm, highs in the fifties, the barn was staying quite cool, but we worried about mice. Every time I glanced at the aged rafters around me, I wrapped another layer of aluminum foil around the Brie.