The Ultimatum That Backfired On My Mother
What we saved for
Clay and I were not the kind of young couple who could put a big wedding or a big honeymoon on a card and worry about it later. He does electrical work for a contractor out of the county seat. I work the front desk and some billing at a family clinic. We got married on a Saturday in June at Piney Fork Baptist, the same sanctuary I had sat in every Sunday of my childhood, folding chairs set up in the fellowship hall after for cake and sweet tea because renting an actual reception hall was not in the budget we had agreed to keep.
For the honeymoon, we picked the cabin above Bull Shoals Lake because it was close enough to drive to in under two hours, because the owner, a retired schoolteacher named Mr. Deaver, cut us a deal on the off season rate, and because neither of us wanted debt hanging over the start of a marriage just to say we had gone somewhere with a passport stamp. Thirteen hundred and forty dollars for four nights, every bit of it saved in an envelope in my sock drawer over the better part of a year. We paid it in cash the day we checked in, and Mr. Deaver, God bless him, told us that was the first time anybody had done that in longer than he could remember.
I told my parents about the trip five months ahead of time. My mother nodded along at the time. I did not think much of it again until three weeks before the wedding, when she called to ask whether we could push the honeymoon back a week because she and my father had a wedding of their own to attend, a second cousin up near Mountain Home, and she wanted me available to help her get ready for it. I said no. It was the first flat no I had ever given her about my own time, and the silence on the other end of that call lasted four full seconds before she said, in a voice gone thin and hurt, that she supposed she would manage.
Two quiet days
The two days before the calls started were, without exaggeration, the best two days of my life up to that point. We fished off the dock and caught nothing and did not care. We drove into the little town nearby for burgers at a diner with a hand painted sign and a pie case that Clay circled twice before choosing. We sat on that creaking porch swing at night and did not talk about my family at all, which for me was its own kind of vacation, a muscle in my chest I had not known was clenched finally letting go.
I remember thinking, somewhere in there, that maybe I had actually done it. Maybe I had built a door out of that house after all, and married a man who would never once ask me to hand over pieces of myself the way that house always had.
I want to be honest and tell you I believed that for about thirty six hours.