“If you want.” Titi shrugged. “There are plenty of other things to be done.”

Without explanation, the peasant got up and wandered back out of the house, wishing us joy in our marriage as he went. I felt bereft. My fifteen minutes as a princess were over, and I had a pile of onions to cut.

“Justine!” Claudine said. “Where are the extra kebab sticks your dad got?”

“How should I know?” Justine retorted. “Why do you always ask me? I can’t keep track of everything!”

There was a rapid explosion of fire between the two, kind of what you could expect from a mother and teenage daughter under a lot of stress. Eyes streaming from the first onion, I turned back to find the others had disappeared.

“I saw a speck of dirt,” Mamie said from the sink.

I turned to the rice I’d been boiling, only to find it had disappeared. Mamie couldn’t possibly be washing it. “Where’s the rice I made for the salade niçoise?”

“Oh, I finished that salad up for you,” Titi said. “It only needed the tuna and mayonnaise added. I put it in the parlor.”

I decided to concentrate on the tabouleh, which contained no animal products, only peppers, tomato, parsley, olive oil, lemon juice, couscous, and raisins. Knowing this salad might be the only one not lethal, I made three gigantic bowls of it. “Laura! You shouldn’t have made that so early,” Claudine said, horrified. “Or that much. Where will we find space in the refrigerator?”

I paused in wiping couscous grains off my hand. “We’ll leave it out,” I said blankly. “Like the rest of the salads, you know, the ones filled with mayonnaise and tuna.”

“Mais non, non, non, non, non!” Claudine grabbed a bowl of tabouleh protectively. “With lemon juice and olive oil in it? You’re not thinking, Laura; if we leave it unrefrigerated, it might taste funny.”

I opened my mouth and closed it, feeling very foreign. Well, actually, being that I was an American and ethnocentric and all, feeling that everyone else around me was very foreign, and even, perhaps, stark raving mad. “I wonder when my sister will get here?” I said out loud. I didn’t normally consider my siblings sane, but it was the contrast.

“Who cut these tomatoes?” Colette said from the dining room. “I can’t find two the same size to fit onto a kebab.”