“I can’t believe all the work your family and your family’s friends have put into this,” Sébastien murmured to me. “We could never have managed it without them.”

“I know,” I said, awed myself at the energy and love being put into making our intercultural love story work. “And when I first introduced you to them, I thought they were going to shoot you.”

The church for our wedding was about as far away from any actual town as it was possible to get, probably due to Southern Baptists. When I was growing up, friends who really cared about me would invite me to their revivals. They didn’t want me to go to Hell for staying a Catholic.

This small Catholic community had been founded in Georgia when a Yankee Carpetbagger decided to import Hungarian and Slovak Catholics to grow Tokay wine and brought in—who better?—French to supervise. When State Prohibition hit in 1907, forty thousand gallons of wine stocked in cellars somehow disappeared overnight, and most of the Catholic families just drifted away, as any intelligent Catholic would when wine was outlawed. A few stayed, maintained in the faith by a missionary priest’s monthly visits to their old one-room schoolhouse. When that property was sold in the early fifties to finance a new church, news hit local papers that moonshiners had been hiding liquor under the altar all these years. The priest and parishioners all acted deeply shocked, but come on. Forty thousand gallons of wine and then moonshine? Who’s kidding whom here?

Anyway, the Catholics obviously felt some need to keep a distance from teetotaling Southern Baptists and so built their new church out in the middle of farm and forest, on land donated by actress Susan Hayward and her family. All the time I was growing up, this was the greatest place. Peacocks wandered in the cemetery and across the parking lots, spreading their vast tails and losing feathers we children ran to collect. In fact, having read that peacock feathers in a house meant the girls in it would never marry, I used to keep some in a vase in self-protection. Ironically enough. The priest, who arrived a month before my birth and stayed until retirement two decades later, kept Irish wolfhounds by the half dozen, somewhat smaller donkeys, and pretty much every other kind of animal life that ever piqued his interest or got abandoned on his doorstep. Some of the wiliest parishioners would openly “donate” unwise animal acquisitions, such as a herd of goats, to the church. We ate some of the goats at Easter feasts, to my father’s annoyance, since he had to help prepare them. Come to think of it, maybe my philosophy professor father and top executive Bruno could swap notes on killing barn animals.