“Maybe I should,” I said, not wanting to start the blubbering bit and ruin my relationship with the family. Just one more day to get through without succumbing to fatigue and stress; surely I could manage that and not pitch a fit, or burst into tears, or in some other way ruin my new French family’s opinion of me?

Bruno’s cell phone rang as I was getting up. “It’s your sister.”

I grabbed it. A din of loud music blared through the receiver into my ear. “Anna? Where are you? Don’t tell me you and Ken got lost, too.”

“No, no, we’re not lost,” she said, far too cheerfully for this to be a good sign. I strained to hear her through a medley of voices and clinking glass.

“Oh—well, good. Did you decide to stop at a hotel?”

“No.”

Oh, dear. “You’re, ah, calling from a restaurant where you’ve just had a wonderful meal.”

“No.” A couple of beeps sounded, the kind a phone makes when the person on the other end of it accidentally presses a button.

“Anna? Are you still there?”

“We ran”—another beep—“out of gas.”

“What?”

“We’re in a bar with a huge Caribbean woman who is supposed to be able to communicate with English speakers. She does this by repeating herself over and over again in French very slowly and very loudly. She and a very drunk Frenchman have been trying to dial for us for the past half hour, and they’re still doing so even though we’re already talking on the phone. A whole crowd of very drunk people are arguing with them about how to do this, and we don’t have any gas.”

“How did you . . . how did you manage to run out of gas?” I just might have sounded a tad hysterical at that point.

“Maybe you should talk to Ken.”

Ken came on. “Laura,” he said, his voice tight-edged, “you didn’t think to mention to me that all the gas stations closed at seven o’clock.”

It was true that I had known this; it had just not occurred to me that other people didn’t know it, just as it had not occurred to me to mention the No Beer Sunday. I realized, alarmed, that I had become as responsible for interpreting French society to my American relatives as I was for interpreting American society to the French. Not only that, but apparently I was as incapable of doing so, since I was beginning to take most things for granted. How had that happened? I still believed in salmonella.

“No,” I admitted, head hanging. “I didn’t.”