The barn smelled of age, dirt, grease from the old cars, and now, pungently, of cheese. Clouds shifted on this halfway clear day, and sunlight pierced chinks in the tiles for a moment, gleaming on the dust motes we had stirred up with our unpacking. I stood a moment and looked to the right at three stacks of flats that all came up to my waist, then to the left at the fifty-year-old, rusty, white barn refrigerator, which now had to have a heavy weight leaned against its door to keep it closed. Mentally, I added to this quantity all the other things stacked in the kitchen, in the cool cellar below the house, and in the village’s party hall refrigerator, waiting to be sliced, diced, mixed, or in the case of the kebabs, stuck together. We were never going to get everything done in time, I thought. Everyone was working as hard as possible with all the goodwill in the world, but to pull off two major wedding feasts on opposite continents in a month just wasn’t humanly possible. And if we failed, what would happen? Something had changed these past two weeks as we worked together in such harmony. It’s not that Sébastien’s family hadn’t welcomed me into their lives long before this; they had welcomed me from the very first. I, though, with my usual trusting emotions, had been hovering by the threshold, still feeling outside, an in-law, not family. Something about that position was changing. I didn’t feel French, exactly. I still knew I was American, and they still knew it, too, as we gazed at each other sometimes in mutual bafflement. But I didn’t feel like an outsider; I felt as if, differences and all, I was right there in the heart of the family with everybody else.