And I didn’t want to screw it up by cracking under the stress of transforming a barn, a cellar, and a house full of raw materials into wedding feast food over the next two days. The past two weeks, working along with everyone, surrounded by all that energy and laughter, had been fun. Lots of my experiences in this intercultural relationship had been more than fun; they had been extraordinary, marvelous, fantastic. I had loved so much of it. But in the past two years, I had sacrificed my Ph.D. program at a prestigious university and pretended not to care. I had moved to a country whose government didn’t want me and spent months hunting for jobs and visas and being cheated and humiliated by employers. I had given up, to my great shame, and gone back home—and thus forced Sébastien to go through the same thing, to give up his much-loved job and city, to spend months fighting with my government and eating pasteurized cheese. We had spent the past year in wedding preparations for four weddings and the past two months in non-stop contact with a crowd of family, both mine and his. I had never been known for emotional stability in the first place, a fact I had been trying to hide from Sébastien’s family for some time; there was no way my French in-laws could still want me in the heart of their family after seeing what I was like when I got hysterical. I could feel the buildup, the long accumulation of stress. If one thing, just one little thing, went wrong before the end of the wedding feast, I might go right over the edge.

I had gotten married a couple of times already this year and had sufficient experience to know one certainty about weddings: something was bound to go wrong.

Thirty-six

The day before the wedding. Gray and cold and gusty, but only occasional raindrops.

The first person Claudine saw when she came downstairs was Titi. All by himself in the kitchen, back to her, hands spread out as if to hold down roiling dogs, he was shaking his head very slowly. “Calme-toi, Titi,” he was saying, over and over, “calme-toi.”

I came in with a tray full of wine bottles left on the table when people went to bed a few hours earlier that morning. I found Claudine bent double with laughter, only her hand against a beam holding her up. “Calm yourself, Titi,” she kept repeating. “Calm yourself.”

The drain from the upstairs shower passed through that of the downstairs shower, and someone had left a bucket over the downstairs drain. The resulting pond reached into the kitchen. Titi had followed wet dog prints to it.

“But it’s okay,” said Titi, with a mop. “It’s okay.”

“Calme-toi,” Claudine sniggered, pressing her hand against her stomach to dispel hysterics.