They had finally arrived.

This trip had been a long time coming. Even twenty years ago, when Mary had originally met her husband’s family, the first words out of her mother-in-law’s mouth had been, “Mary, it’s so nice to finally meet you! I’m Mama Martha. Julien has told us so much about you. Has he ever told you that our family is French?”

It may have taken two decades, but they had finally arrived in the land of pastries, fine wine, and high fashion.

Mary was not impressed so far. You’d think the taxi driver would have fetched their suitcases from the trunk as part of the service, but he didn’t. Julien grabbed his suitcase, then pulled out his wallet to pay the driver. Mary pulled out her own suitcase, simultaneously annoyed and unsurprised that Julien hadn’t grabbed it for her.

As the taxi pulled away, Mary and Julien rolled, but mostly dragged, their suitcases up the gravel driveway and through the fifteen-foot tall, wrought-iron gate that had been left open in anticipation of their arrival.

Over the course of their eighteen years of marriage, Mary had not once spent time with her family-in-law without something French coming up in conversation. She had even asked Julien about it once.

“Why is your mom so proud to be French?”

Julien didn’t even bother looking at her when he responded. “Your mother throws the biggest Fourth of July party in Lake County. Every year, she wears the same stars and stripes jumpsuit, paints her face red, white, and blue, and rents a speaker system loud enough for the Canadians to hear her sing the Star Spangled Banner.”

“So?”

“So why is your mom so proud to be American?”

And that was the end of that.

Mary, who had never had an eye for design, was struck by the French garden around her. Well-kept topiary drew her eyes and blossoming roses won over her nose. The gravel driveway was circular with a green oasis in the middle, featuring a fountain that looked clean enough to drink out of. To her right, a statue caught Mary’s eye among the trees and shrubs; it almost looked like a Rodin.

The only family member of Julien’s who still lived in France was the legendary Uncle André. A master chef, skilled engineer, and talented painter, he was known in the family as an old friend of Picasso’s, though he claimed that Picasso was nowhere near as much fun as Hemingway. Mary’s parents-in-law had been visiting him here at his house every summer since before she met Julien.

“Mary, you must join us. You’ll just love the French countryside,” Martha would tell her. Mary had always wanted to. France was the epicenter of so much invention and creation. She could name all 25 French presidents in order alphabetically and chronologically (by term of office), but she had never eaten a croissant with a view of the Eiffel Tower (or a field of lavender or the Mediterranean sea – she wasn’t that picky).

Julien wasn’t really the romantic type though, nor the type to explore new countries. “Why on Earth,” he would say, “would I spend seven hours one way crammed on a plane full of strangers to go somewhere where I can’t even communicate with anyone when we have a summer house just two hours away by car all set up exactly how I like it?” So each summer was spent at their Indiana summer house with a view of Lake Michigan and the years went by without Mary ever having to complain about jet lag.

Boy, was she ready to complain about it now. Her eyes were heavy, her limbs were stiff, and her brain was hardly functioning. But she wouldn’t say any of that out loud. She had been wanting this trip her whole life and she would not give Julien any ammunition to argue never returning.

As they approached the front door, Mary forgot about the jet lag as she took in the house. At a glance, she guessed it had to be a minimum of 8,000 square feet, easily six rooms on each floor. She remembered that every year Uncle André sent her parents-in-law home from their summer visit with an exquisitely expensive gift. Seeing his mansion, her picture of him became clearer.

A woman came out of the front door in jeans and a t-shirt. “Bonjour,” she said and reached for the bags.

“Oh, it’s alright,” Julien attempted to decline her help politely with hand motions, but apparently made-up American sign language does not always translate well into French. With hardly any eye contact at all, the woman took both suitcases, wrangling them inside.

“Was that Vanessa?” Mary asked.

“I don’t know; I’ve never met her.”

“Are you supposed to be related to her?”

“I’m not totally sure,” Julien said as he took the two steps up to the open door.

“How are you related to Uncle André again?”

“He’s my mom’s uncle.”

Mary followed him inside, where the insulation of the marble walls kept the temperature a stark ten degrees cooler than outside. “I thought your mom said something about him being her aunt’s grandfather.”

A woman in a floral dress and navy blazer entered the foyer from another room, somehow making no sound in low heels on the marble floor. “It’s best not to ask too many questions when it comes to French relations.” Her French accent was tinted with the husk of decades of cigarette smoking. “I’m Vanessa, your cousin.”

Vanessa shook Julien’s hand, then Mary’s. “Remind me, it’s Julien and…”

“Mary.”

“Ah, good. Mary is easy.” Seeing the look of confusion on their faces, Vanessa explained. “Some American names are difficult to pronounce in French, but most languages in Europe already have some variation of the name ‘Mary’.”

“Oh?”

“For the virgin, of course.”

“Yes, of course.” Mary echoed, visibly caught off guard.

“You’re not religious?” Vanessa probed.

“Well,” Mary sputtered, “I’m just… more of a… numbers person.” It was Vanessa’s turn to be confused. “I’m a professor of economics.”

Vanessa smiled knowingly. “You think money and God are mutually exclusive?”

Wonderful. Mary had managed to offend the first person she was speaking to on this trip.

“History,” Julien interjected, “might suggest quite the opposite: that religion and money are often intertwined.” Mary would have been thankful for his help except that she knew he would hold on to this moment, waiting for the ideal time to throw her mistake in her face at a later date.

Turning her attention to her cousin, Vanessa smiled more broadly. “You are a professor of history?”

The woman in the jeans who had taken their suitcases appeared half way down the stairs, next to a vaguely familiar impressionist painting and waited politely for Vanessa to notice her.

“An estate lawyer.”

“Ah, yes. How could I forget. That’s why you are here, no?”

Switching to French without even turning her head away from Julien, Vanessa exchanged several words in gibberish with the mystery woman in jeans. Then, she disappeared back up the stairs and Vanessa switched back to English.

“Uncle André is taking his afternoon nap and your room will be ready soon. Would you like a tour of the property in the meantime?”

Outside was seven acres of pools and fountains, bushes and trees, statues and benches, garden and lawn, hedges and archways and secret gates to even more manicured grounds. There was a rose garden and a vegetable garden and an orchard and even a few rows of grapes for the family wine.

Mary wondered where the gardeners and landscapers were. There had to be a whole team of them. Did they have their own rooms in the house? Did they drop by once a week for maintenance? How did one even begin to keep up with all this art and nature?

As Vanessa showed them around, she told stories about Uncle André and it occurred to Mary just how much she already knew about this man she had never met. She had gotten so used to seemingly normal conversations with Julien’s parents getting hijacked by Uncle André despite the fact that the Frenchman was an ocean away from Martha’s Midwest rambler. Each story taught her bits and pieces here and there, but over time the accumulation amounted to an entire life story.

Mary remembered just last week bringing up the movie Casablanca at Sunday dinner with her in-laws. Martha’s response was all-too familiar: “You know, Uncle André’s been to Morocco.”

“Oh, has he?”

“Yes, during the war.”

Uncle André had allegedly been to a lot of places “during the war.” The long list of locations included Siam, Madagascar, Syria, Guadeloupe, New Zealand, Brazil, Algeria, Canada, and Kosovo, which became a country three years after Uncle André broke his hip and stopped traveling, though Mary was smarter than to mention this – or any – inconsistency regarding the iconic Uncle André.

About half way through the tour, Vanessa’s cell phone rang. She stepped away to take the call, inviting Mary and Julien to wander at their leisure.

“So,” Mary wasn’t quite sure which question to start with. “I thought Uncle André was the only family member still in France.”

Julien reached up to pick a cherry from the tree overhead. “Yeah, well, I’m starting to think a lot of words are used loosely when it comes to my family.”

“Like ‘only’ in ‘only family member left’?”

Julien tore the stem from the cherry, popped it into his mouth, and responded between bites of fruit. “Yeah. Or ‘cousin’, as in how I’m related to Vanessa.”

“I guess that makes sense though.” The clouds began to darken above them.

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” Mary reached her hand out past the tree cover, palm up, to see if it was starting to rain. “Since everything else about Uncle André is made up.”

Seeing her outstretched hand, Julien spit out the cherry pit into his own, then dropped it and the stem into Mary’s open hand. “Nothing about Uncle André is made up.”

Appalled, yet once more unsurprised by this move, Mary stared at the ground as she clenched her teeth. “Your mother once told me he met Napoleon.”

“Maybe he did.”

“Napoleon Bonaparte died in 1821.” With Julien facing away from her, Mary dumped her husband’s discards on the ground. “Are you telling me that Uncle André is 200 years old?”

Julien sighed. “You know, you don’t always have to be right about everything.”

“It’s not about being right, it’s about logic.”

“I literally argue all day at work and it is the last thing I want to do when I come home.” Julien plucked another cherry from a tree.

“Well, we wouldn’t argue if you wouldn’t make ridiculous statements like ‘nothing about Uncle André is made up’!” Mary cut through the tree line, breaking out of their original trajectory, moving away from Julien before he tried to hand her more garbage.

It was part of their rhythm, for Julien to go one way and Mary to go another. It was like this at the Indiana summerhouse, too. Mary would go swimming while Julien read in the garden, then Mary would sit in the garden once Julien went for a walk. Each day was a wonderful stream of happy minutes spent apart with the confidence that help was in the other room if need be. Like planets that orbited each other, they never strayed too far, yet also kept their distance from one another.

In the day-to-day normal, Mary had grown grateful for her life. But now, suddenly, she had a taste of something new. They had not traveled to Indiana, but to France – a trip she had always wanted to take. A dream of hers was finally being realized and, somewhere in her subconscious, she began to wonder about other possibilities, about what else could change and what else she wanted.

Twisting and turning through the labyrinth of Uncle André’s property, Mary came around a hedge to find a boy of maybe sixteen laying on a bench, crying.

… to be continued …