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I was sitting at a table sometime around 11ish pm in a small village in Northern France called La Madeleine (charming, non?). On the table was my beer, and the beer of the man who would be my father in law for a very brief and spectacular splash on my timeline. I’d traveled to France to join my husband who was recovering from knee surgery. He’d torn his ACL in the states and we were too young and poor to afford health insurance, so taking care of it in France was the best option. We’d just gotten married, and neither of us had met the other’s family yet, so this was a good excuse for me to join him and make that happen. A nervous tremble in my belly that started on my flight from Newark airport and grew more intense with each passing minute exploded into a chaotic firework that shot through my whole body lighting my nervous system on fire the second I heard the front door open followed by a loud voice that shouted eagerly into the open floor plan: “OKAY! ELLO! WHERE IS SHE? WHERE IS ZE AMERICAN?” My heart raced and I could barely breathe. My twenty-three-year-old self had never been so nervous. Do I say "hello" or "ello"? Wait no, don’t I say “Bonsoir”? No that doesn’t feel right… There wasn’t enough time to decide before a large figure turned the corner and met my eyes. He marched straight up to me with a giant smile on his face. “Hello American girl!” he boomed and moved in for a traditional double kiss french greeting that I always hated and performed terribly. He moved back to give me a proper look. Then he turned to my husband: “She is short, zis American.” That made me giggle. “I like zis laugh,” he said. I liked him. But I never liked him more than I did two weeks later, sitting together, just the two of us, sharing a beer that he insisted I must try because it was his favorite. “I did not expect to like you,” he told me through a half squint and quite a devilish little smile. This is an expression that I have since become keenly aware of as a particularly french way to look at someone. Honestly, I couldn’t blame him. I met his son while living in the most vapid and narcissistic city in the whole world while attempting to join ranks in the most vapid and narcissistic business in the whole world. How could I blame him? I wouldn’t have expected to like me, either, with little context outside of “she’s a wannabe actress in LA”. I had married his son after only a few months together and before either of us had met the other’s family. We were both quite drunk, to be honest, when he started to cry. It’s spectacular to see a grown man cry. “I did not expect to like you, Ash-lay” he repeated through his thick accent straight into my young, bubbling, American heart. “And now…you are my daughter!” He looked me right in the eyes as he wiped away the mist, no hint of embarrassment. There I was, a simple, five foot nothing little idiot from Arkansas, watching a burly 50-something man cry to my face because he was so happy that I existed and was sharing a beer with him. “You are a good person. I see this.” He stared into me for a while, searching for his English. I quietly sipped my beer and stared back. It wasn’t at all uncomfortable to sit inside the silence of that fleeting moment with this glassy-eyed grownup, an absolute stranger to me just three weeks earlier, celebrating a totally sincere bond that we both suspected would be short-lived, him feeling real things in his heart that I can still feel in mine. His silence finally broke into a hearty laugh “and now you are my daughter!” My heart melted. A beat passed. We cheers’d. I think we might have shared a cigarette. And did we walk back home in the snow? That part I don’t remember.