“We kept driving and driving, thinking we would run into a place that was open twenty-four hours or at least until ten, but no. Then we kind of hoped that maybe we’d find your damn farmhouse before we ran out of gas. But no. Fortunately—or maybe unfortunately, it’s still too early to tell—we ran out near a bar, and now we have a lot of very drunk people around us trying to help us dial.”

I stared down the table, seeing not a single person I could ask to go in my stead, after they had all already worked so hard for me. And I couldn’t drive a stick shift without stalling. It was going to be a long trip over there in the middle of the night, with me stalling at every stop sign.

Sue reached over and stroked my hair. “We’ll go get them,” she said.

“Sue, if I had only one bar of chocolate left from A la petite fabrique, I would give it to you. Unfortunately, Mamie and I ate it for lunch. But you are a true friend.”

I turned back to the phone to give Anna and Ken the promise of rescue. “By the way,” Anna said, “we called Sébastien’s phone first. I’m pretty sure I heard him say, ‘Merde, my turn!’ before somebody named Grégory came on the line and gave us Bruno’s number. Sébastien wasn’t in Paris when I called him, was he? If he missed a turn in that city, it will be hours before he gets out of it.”

By the time I went to bed, Sébastien and his brother Grégory still had not arrived. I lay awake listening to Bruno and the rest singing below and imagined wind whipping away the tents, hail pounding down on the guests, and an entire hospital ward full of my belle famille, all on IVs and cursing the American bride for food poisoning them.

Thirty-seven

Sébastien and Grégory finally reached the farmhouse at 2:00 A.M. I learned of their arrival not when two weary men climbed up the stairs to bed but when two fine tenors joined in the dirty ditties down below. Sébastien and his family didn’t go to bed until 3:00 A.M.

The first alarm went off at 5:30 only a few feet from my ear. “Oh, my God,” I said. “What’s that?”

The second alarm sounded from the other side of the room, Grégory’s watch. As if the insanity were contagious, a third alarm bleeped from over by Colette’s mattress.

“It can’t possibly be time to get up yet,” I said, about ready to cry. I hadn’t even dreamed of hundreds of guests vomiting in the grass, because I hadn’t fallen into a deep enough sleep.