The car in front of us stalled only half a mile later, scaring me. Was our cocky parade through Provence going to come to a halt so soon? The whole procession pulled over to the side of the road behind the problem car, and men thronged around the thin hood as it was folded up. The insides of the engine looked so simple even I might have been able to put them together in a third-grade science class, and they held the power of a super magnet. I had never felt any interest in cars in my life; I had once driven a full mile on a flat tire, all the time with this vague sense that my truck was riding kind of funny, before two sixteen-year-old boys in hunting clothes who had been flashing their lights at me for half a mile finally got me to pull over and changed the tire for me. But these classic cars were different. I found myself craning on tiptoe to look over the shoulders of the men gathered around the engine. I wasn’t the only one. With a dozen men already at work on the problem—all classic car experts, as proven by the parade parked along the side of the road—not one but two modern car drivers nevertheless stopped to ask if we needed any help. “I saw you broken down and just wanted to check and make sure you had everything you needed.” A hand sneaked out to caress the shiny curves of the vehicle. “I’m pretty good with cars. Do you want me to take a look at it?” A chin tucked in discreet but transparent craving toward the exposed engine.

“Merci,” said the driver, which, by an odd but culturally significant vagary of French, means “no.” His white head bent while he blew briskly through a detached fuel line. “Got a speck of dirt in it, is all.” And off we went again.

By the third stall, I kept my calm. The younger generation, I thought disparagingly of the 1938 Renault Celta 4 and patted our 1928 Torpedo smugly. I had always thought things had gone downhill from the twenties. Besides, our Torpedo was a convertible and had two windshields: one for the front seat and one for the back. Beat that.

I wandered across the road to gaze at the nearly ripe apricots that weighted the trees. Some of the other classic car drivers and long-term passengers were starting to look disgruntled.

“Him again,” Sébastien’s stepgrandmother, Violette, shook her head in disgust, propping her elbow against the door of her 1952 Peugeot. Both round and barrel-chested, with a hefty way of moving, she had recently come out of the hospital after a major bout with illness and was much less aggressive these days than she used to be, everybody swore. “There’s a man who can’t keep his cars in order.”