Page 78 of A Love So Hard

“Okay, now I really repeat, anything I should know about?”

“No, I’m all good. Plenty of years left on my ticker anyway, according to the fuckin quack Lucy made me go see just to ‘be sure’.” I told him with the air quotes around ‘be sure’ because that’s how she’d given it to me when she wanted me to go in for a checkup out of the blue six months ago. “It’s something I’ve been thinking on since Toby’s funeral actually. I just had other shit happening for a while, then life was too sweet and I forgot.”

“So what made you remember?”

“Working on what to say at the wedding made me remember,” I told him. “We’re not promised time on this earth. We get what we get, and make the most of it while we can. I don’t want to check out accidentally without getting my goodbyes in.”

“Damn, you’re a morbid fucker!” He commented, and then turned his back to me. Before he made it out of the garage he swiveled back around for a minute. “We doing this thing today, or what?”

I grinned at my best friend. My brother. “Yeah, we’re doing this thing,” I agreed and then I followed him out of my garage and to our bikes that were waiting for us. We both fired them up and took off, running up the road to the church, and the wedding, that was waiting on us.

It didn’t take us long to get there since the church was right down the road from where our house was in North Charleston. Merc and I parked out front, but then walked around the building and entered in through the back entrance. Somewhere, inside this building, my Lucy was waiting for me. I didn’t plan on making her wait any longer than I had to though. We made our way down a long hall and then out on the side of the main hall of the church. Hushed voices filled the room as Merc and I made our way to the altar where we took our positions. I tipped my head once to the man off to the side where he began playing the wedding march on a guitar. It was a beautiful acoustic version that Lucy had picked herself.

As I stood waiting while the doors at the back of the room – or was it front? Fuck it, it was the part of the church I was looking at from the altar – started to open I remembered the first time I had done this. Our experience then had been so different. One of those big differences had been Toby. He was standing here with me the first time. My hand reached out in a subtle gesture, touching the air beside me. It was what I had done the first time when I reached out to hold his hand as he excitedly told me, “here she comes daddy.” He had been just as ramped up to see his mother that day as I was. Fuck! I missed my boy.

Merc’s hand gently squeezed my shoulder. “He’s here.” His words were a quiet whisper, and yet they made my soul ache was if they were a sonic boom going off inside of me. When I glanced down the aisle again, she was there being trailed by both of our girls. She was wearing a similar dress to the one she’d worn for our first wedding. Not the same one, because she wasn’t the same woman. She was also a woman who had given birth to another child and had grown a little rounder with age over the years. My Lucy was still just as beautiful as the first trip we took down the aisle though. Each of our girls walked so gracefully down the aisle. Both glowed with a radiance that said they were happy. That was all I could ever ask for in this life. I knew that, because I’d struggled to grab onto my own happy and hold it tight. When my girls got to the end of the aisle they paused and waited for the pastor to speak.

“Who has the honor of presenting this woman in a renewal of her vows and love for this man before us?”

“We do,” my girls said in unison. The pastor smiled down on them and each girl placed a quick kiss on their mother’s cheek before they moved off to the side to stand as her matron’s of honor. There were two of them to go hand in hand with my two best men. Merc and Toby. I remembered what our boy said to me the day I married his mother. “Love my mom and me so hard we feel your hugs even when you ain’t there.” Later on, after all was said and done, I would swear that I felt his hand in mine that day too. Doesn’t matter how crazy it sounds either. It was a feeling no one was going to take away from me. I hoped like hell he was still feeling my hugs, because he didn’t know it then, none of us did, but that sentiment went both ways. Even when he wasn’t here, I still felt his love so damn hard.

“This man, Charles Jason Brothers, is here to present his vows once again to the woman before him, Lucy Ann Brothers,” the Pastor intoned and then it was on me.

I cleared my throat and turned to face my bride. Again. Her clear blue eyes had a few more lines around them now, especially when she was smiling at me the way she was in that moment. “When we were younger I made a lot of vows and promises to you. Some, I was able to keep. Others were ripped away or slipped off with the sands of time. The one vow I never broke in all our years was the one I made the day we met.” She seemed shocked by that admission. I grinned brightly down at her. “That day you marked yourself with my engine grease,” I reminded her as I slipped my fingertip down her nose and everyone in the church laughed thinking I meant something a lot dirtier. “I vowed to myself that you would become mine and I would cherish you for the rest of our lives. We’re still living, and I’m still cherishing, babe.” There were a few audible “aws” from the people attending, but I wasn’t done yet. “Some days, I think that’s all we get. That one vow, because life, as we know, can be short. It can be tragic, but it can always be wonderful and filled to the top with memories that will live on even when we’re long gone. I promise to keep filling our family with those memories, to keep loving my children’s mother, and to keep my woman in my heart for the rest of my days and beyond until we are set free into the wind to go join our boy once more.” Lucy was having a hard time with her emotions. Her shoulders shook, and tears ran freely down her face as the Pastor directed the vows back to her. I wasn’t sure she’d be able to pull it together enough, but she managed long enough to get two lines out.

“What he said,” she told the Pastor as everyone in attendance tried to stifle giggles after I brought them to tears. Then she added, “Until we’re set free into the wind,” and she ended it there, unable to get the rest out. It didn’t matter because my lips were on hers, tasting the salt from the tears that had traced them before I got there.

“Well, they jumped the gun again, just like last time,” that Pastor teased bringing levity back to the occasion. “I suppose some things never change, and in this case, that’s a good thing. Bless this couple and their continued union.”

And that was how Lucy and I found ourselves married again. Well, renewing our wedding vows at any rate. Thirty-one years since the day we met, 22 years of marriage, three children, a couple grand kids, and from the looks of it maybe another on the way, and a lifetime of a love so hard it nearly tore us apart a few times over, but we hung in there. We fought for this, and damn if we weren’t going to enjoy the rest of our lives together, come hell or high water.

Chapter 33

(Lucy – age 48, Double-D – age 51)

There were pings coming in on my cell every few minutes, but it was my turn to drive so I couldn’t see what they were. CJ, on the other hand, was all up in my phone and judging by the goofy grin on his face one of the girls was sending pictures of our grandbabies. We’d be heading back to South Carolina soon to see them ourselves, but we promised ourselves six months of touring the country as a honeymoon, and we were only four months in. I wanted to stick it out, see the country, and experience life with CJ. I also wanted to go home and snuggle those babies.

“That’s it!” I finally yelled when he had the audacity to coo at a picture. That’s right, my big, tough, burly biker man was cooing like a woman at the pictures that were coming in. Damn him. “I’m pulling this rig over!”

CJ glanced up from my phone and laughed. “Hit the next truck stop, babe. We’ll gas up and I’ll take over for a bit. He leaned in and kissed my temple and then tucked back into my phone to ooh and ahh over our grandbabies without me again. I had to try to focus on finding a truck stop, because wouldn’t you know it, the next three exits didn’t appear to have one. I growled and CJ glanced over again. “Patience baby. Take exit 330.”

“Take exit 330,” I mocked to which he just shook his head and laughed. He was so damn handsome when he laughed. Those deep blue eyes of his sparkled and that made them seem bluer, then there were the lines that had been gradually deepening out from the corners of his eyes. Those too made the butterflies in my tummy go wild just like they had the first day I laid eyes on him when he was still just a teenage boy. I swung our motorhome into the slow lane, preparing for our exit in ten miles so I wouldn’t have to fight to get over. All the while I was lost in memory.

When I was a young girl I dreamed of a love that would last a lifetime. I knew what my parents had was not the lifetime kind of love I wanted for myself. If I was being honest, some of what CJ and I had experienced over the years, I could have done without, though I now knew that everything came with a balance. We wouldn’t be where we were today if not for the things that had brought us here. The good, the bad, the tragic, they all played their part. Still, when I looked at my man, my soul glowed with the love that I felt for him even after all this time. That wasn’t right. It glowed especially because of all of our time together.

I had grown up religious, the type where my mom forced me to go to church every Sunday so that she could gossip about all the women there and what their men were up to anyway. I guess that’s why I hadn’t stuck with it as an adult or forced church on my kids. The thing was, the older I got, the more years I got with my man, the greedier I got too. I found myself wanted to believe, hoping beyond the normal amount of hope, that when our time came there really was something else out there for us where we could be together. Not only did I hope that because I needed with my every breath to see Toby again, but because 20 years, 30 years, whatever time we had left on this earth, it would never be enough.

“Babe, you’re about to miss our exit,” CJ called out to me. I took the exit a little sharper than I knew he liked, but he didn’t say anything. I also knew he was watching me.

“Everything okay?”

“Yeah, sorry babe, just lost in thought.”

“Whatcha thinking about?”

“You, time, everything,” I answered with a shrug of my shoulders.

“That sounds like a lot,” he commented.

---