I Said Yes

My Story of Heartbreak, Redemption, and True Love

Thomas Nelson

Church lady," my brother, Ernie, three years my senior, spewed with disgust. I pretended I didn't hear. It was a name he had called me for years. And oddly, it had nothing to do with the fact that I went to church. Because I didn't, except on that rare occasion when it didn't seem like such an enormous chore for my parents to get everyone together and out the door on time for Catholic Mass. I was dubbed the church lady because I was more or less a Goody Two-Shoes. (Maybe just one reason I had a tendency to fall for the bad boys, some of whom shall remain nameless in my vault of shame.) As a little girl, it made sense to follow the rules. I was pretty stringent. And I wasn't shy about voicing my disapproval when the ones I loved most committed certain infractions. Like smoking.

I remember when I was around ten, bouncing up the creaky wooden staircase in our home, when I heard a familiar click-click-click from the stove. My father was lighting a cigarette the old-fashioned way. I made a beeline down the stairs and tore into the kitchen screaming bloody murder. "Dad, don't do that!" I pleaded, tears streaming down my face. "You're going to die."

A chill from the tiled kitchen floor shivered through my body as a scene from health class a few weeks earlier replayed in my mind. The teacher had droned on and on ad nauseam about the harmful effects of smoking. I sat at my desk, barely hearing a word she was saying, riveted by a glossy photograph that was being passed around the room. There, right before my eyes, was a high-quality image of a blackened, diseased lung. I stared in horror at the charred-looking organ. So when Dad whipped out a deadly cancer stick from his back pocket, all I could think about was what was happening to his insides. Unfortunately, he didn't appreciate my good-willed theatrics. A man who stuffed his emotions, Dad simply rolled his eyes, realizing he could avoid the drama by not smoking in front of me.

Sometimes, if he was annoyed enough at my church-lady antics, he gave me more than an eye roll. Like the time we were in Key West, where we spent a few weeks most summers, and Dad reached for his crinkly pack of smokes. On cue I started ranting and raving with high-pitched cries. My father shook his head and reached for something else in his other back pocket.

"Here," he sighed, pressing a credit card into the palm of my hand. "Go on now, sweetie, go shopping."

Staying true to my obedient little self, I wiped dry my tears and nodded in compliance. "Okay, Dad. I will." It was his most expensive cigarette.

Planting roots near Cheat Lake in Morgantown, West Virginia, home to the state's largest university, my father was an old-fashioned man who held firm to some pretty antiquated values I didn't agree with but, like a good Southern girl, rarely questioned. Dad was a hard worker; he still is. Growing up with empty pockets, he toiled in the coal mines as a teenager, spending ten grueling hours per day far below the earth's surface in the presence of thick dust, heavy equipment, and noxious fumes. He worked his way up over the years and bought a handful of coal mines; today he owns two as he is beginning to retire. I loved Dad but didn't see him much as business took up most of his time.

If I was the church lady, Mom was the Southern Martha Stewart, which means, unlike the famed M. Diddy (Martha's prison name), my mother wore a lot of noisy bangles and had a slight and very charming twang in her voice.