We made kebabs until we were ready to commit hari-kari on the damn sticks. We grabbed squishy meat. We stabbed. We grabbed squishy meat. We stabbed. Someone wandered through and said maybe the pepper should go on the other side of the meat, just to be more decorative. We grabbed that person. We stabbed. Okay, that last was just one of my personal fantasies. Only half a dozen of us focused on the kebabs, but everyone else was working just as frantically hard outside. I wished I could be outside, instead of stuck here stabbing meat. I knew we were in trouble when we didn’t stop for lunch or even cocktail hour. The men drank their sustenance standing, and I depleted Titi and Bruno’s candy stock. Putting store purchases away, I’d discovered a surprising amount of chocolate they’d hidden in the back of cupboards just prior to my arrival. And I had always thought them so hospitable.

I was pleased to note that nobody else cared what the hell the tomatoes looked like by the end of the day, either. I did try to sneak the kebabs into the refrigerator but couldn’t figure out how to fit them in. Six hundred kebabs take up a lot of space.

“Oh, don’t worry,” Claudine said. “They’ll be cooked before anyone eats them; they’ll be fine.”

I made one last-ditch effort to save the bowl of mayonnaise that Jean-Charles made as a dip to accompany the vegetable basket. Whipped together with raw eggs and a slow, steady stream of olive oil, the rich golden concoction would fit perfectly into the last spare corner of the kitchen refrigerator.

“Are you crazy?” Colette threw herself between it and the icebox as if saving the mayonnaise from a bullet. “If you put it into the refrigerator, the change in temperature will affect the flavor!”

At some point, we got the church decorated, and Sébastien left for Paris to pick up his teenage brother Grégory, who was coming in on the train from a summer internship in Ireland. Sébastien called us three hours later, just about the time we were starting to prepare dinner. In America, we would have called Domino’s at this point, but here we were about two hours away from the nearest pizza place. Besides, my French in-laws thought that people who had worked so hard all day deserved to enjoy a good meal, even if that meant preparing it. Over the cell phone, Sébastien sounded tired and annoyed. “Grégory missed his train and will be here in another three hours.”