I laughed in a hiccuping, hysterical way. “That’s what I’m talking about. It will never work. Our cultures are too different. And I’m so tired. We keep going back and forth between both cultures trying to pull both sides together; it’s an impossible thing to make work.”

“It will work,” Claudine said. “We ate grits, didn’t we? It will work fine. Now don’t get sidetracked on other issues. You said your problem was the lipstick; let’s stick with that, why don’t we?”

By the time we got to the church, I had calmed down enough to feel deeply ashamed of myself, but my stomach was still roiling. Sébastien’s probably was, too, but I couldn’t know for sure. Bruno was driving the groom’s car, decked out in a twenties gangster tuxedo, and they had left the house first, without a cell phone. From far back on the country road behind them, in the bridal car, Jean-Charles, Justine, Mamie, and I had watched helpless as they took the wrong turn. I hoped it was a wrong turn, and Sébastien hadn’t decided to flee his third marriage to me. He’d been pretty annoyed when I started yelling and throwing my wedding dress around; he might finally have seen the light and realized he deserved a lot better. We circled around the little stone village a few times to wait. Jean-Charles wanted us to arrive last, as was only proper for a bride and her 1931 Citroen C4, which had to be seen in all its glory.

At a top speed of thirty miles per hour, Bruno couldn’t really speed to make up for lost time, but the groom’s party finally found a way out of their shortcut. Jean-Charles circled one more time while Sébastien and his mother and attendants disem-barked. We were fifteen minutes late.

In French tradition, guests wait outside the church to see the bridal party arrive, even on freezing gray days like this fine August morning; but as I descended from the car I spotted Claudine frantically trying to force the crowd of guests into the church while Sébastien stood tight-lipped in front of the priest, staring off at some fixed point in the distance. Sébastien’s oversized father and uncles were eyeing the priest in a way that couldn’t be good.

“What’s wrong?” I muttered to Sue and Anna as they joined us. Sue was wearing a sexy strapless black dress with a flirty skirt and looking half frozen. Anna, in the long midnight-blue bridesmaid gown that had worked so well in a Georgia summer, didn’t look much warmer. Goose bumps had sprung up on all our arms. At least they had made it out of last night’s bar alive and found the church, though, which was more than I had been expecting at this point.