Let’s just sum up some of his physical details, while we’re at it. Elegant, fastidious about his clothes, Sébastien shyly spoke an accented English taught by British professors, an education that left him woefully unprepared for two weeks of Georgia redneck conversation. To top off these handicaps, he had been perverse enough to get both ears pierced and have that Polynesian-inspired design tattooed around his right biceps. If a beer can or an American flag had been tattooed there, God knows, some common ground might have been possible, as long as the earrings went. But no. Those damn French never had known how to compromise.

And what if he told my parents he was an atheist, for God’s sake? I sternly forbade him to mention this and pretty much everything else he believed or didn’t believe, and I even hinted he might want to take off his earrings, but he said he must come as who he was or not come. This showed unfortunate strength of character on his part.

To be perfectly frank, when I had started dating him, Georgia seemed so far away I’d forgotten to include what my family would think of him (or he would think of my family) in my criteria for selecting a boyfriend. In a family my size, this is always a mistake. I mean, we had a slight compatibility problem here. My family was going to think he was a highfalutin Parisian snob. My oldest brother had threatened to shoot anyone my niece dated who sported earrings, and he made a practice of cleaning his shotgun whenever potential boyfriends were around. And Sébastien was going to think my family was a horde of barbarians. My oldest brother was a horde of barbarians in and of himself, and that was before you started counting the next three.

Of course, Sébastien was the only French male I’d ever met who knew how to fire a handgun, so he might show some promise for getting along in the Southern world. But it was a slim hope. Besides, my brothers had never accepted any male brought home by any of their sisters, ever. And one sister had been married for fifteen years.

The closer we got to it, the more the idea of Christmas, that whole beautiful family season, with one boyfriend and four brothers arriving at our parents’ home one after the other, was starting to stand all my nerves on end. My parents seemed a little tense about it, too, which was understandable, because they’d seen me and my brothers get into way too many fights already. “He’s French,” my mother said.

“I’m sorry,” I said defensively. “I didn’t mean to. You know. It just happened.”

“What should we serve him to eat?” my mother asked, looking panicky. My mother looks a bit like the Queen of England, but she doesn’t have the royal nerves under pressure.