By then, Pokey's grandmother had already started her slow descent into senility, although Annajane had not known that. The original church was a quaint, stoop-shouldered gray granite affair, with uneven oak floors, a single Gothic-arched leaded-glass window above the altar, and two rows of ten primitively wrought pine pews built by black laborers from the casket factory in Moore County, twenty minutes down the road.Īnnajane could remember sitting beside her best friend, Pokey, in the Bayless family pew after countless Saturday-night sleepovers, back when they were both still in pigtails. If anybody could do that, Annajane mused, it would be Celia.Ĭould there be a more beautiful setting? Baylesses had been getting married at the Church of the Good Shepherd for nearly two hundred years. Or perhaps she'd specified blue skies and color-coordinated bursts of blooms in one of her famously precise memos. It was as if the bride, the equally flawless Celia Wakefield, had somehow managed to will perfect weather. Only the first week in April, yet the dogwoods and azaleas were already burst into bloom, and the weeping cherry trees lining the walkway to the church trailed fingertips of pale pink onto a blue and white carpet of violets and alyssum. Spring had arrived spectacularly early in Passcoe, North Carolina. From her seat in the sanctuary of the Church of the Good Shepherd, Annajane Hudgens wondered if there had ever been a more flawless day for a wedding.

Spring fever by mary kay andrews