This Life I Live: One Man's Extraordinary, Ordinary Life and the Woman Who Changed It Forever

by Rory Feek

  I was okay with that. I really was. I didn’t expect anything, especially anything good. It was too good to be true, and that made it easy for me to dismiss. If something like this happened (or almost happened) in years past, I would’ve been stressing over it. Working every angle to try to make it happen. But that’s not where I was. God had me somewhere different. I had been putting my future in His hands and was feeling good about leaving it there. I have a feeling that’s part of why it came to be in the end . . . because I was okay with it, even if it didn’t.

  Maybe that’s how God’s logic works. You have to be okay with not having something to be given it. I think about that often: God’s logic. Things like . . . he who is least is greatest. Whoever is last is first. Give it away if you want to keep it. Die to really live. It doesn’t really make sense on paper, but it works. And that’s all that matters.

  I got a call from Joey on Valentine’s Day. It was late morning, and she said that she had broken up with the doctor. That he was supposed to come down that weekend but was too busy with work. She had given him three chances, and this had been his third and final chance. They were over. She said if I wanted to spend time with her, she was available and would like that. The vet clinic she worked for was having a little Valentine’s get-together that evening, and she wanted to know if I’d like to come with her. As her date.

  I didn’t really have to think about it. I knew the answer.

  I hung up the phone and called the girl I was dating and told her it was over. We just didn’t work out. I know that probably hurt her, but we had been dating only a short while. God had just moved a mountain, right in front of me. And I was going to see what was on the other side.

  I spent the evening with Joey, her coworkers, and the doctors she worked for. They were all wonderful. I could see that they loved her. Joey was a hard worker and incredibly devoted to her job. To anything she committed to. But I also learned that when she turned a corner and was finished with something, such as her ex-boyfriend, she never looked back. I filed that away. This is a woman who means business. She won’t break up with me and later want to get back together, letting drama run her life and mine for months on end as it had in the last couple of relationships I’d had. For Joey, commitment was a one-time thing. I could tell with her, things were gonna be different.

  The truth is, Joey wasn’t what I was looking for. I’m ashamed to say that, but it’s true. I had always dated voluptuous women, and Joey was tall and thin. With the girls I dated I had always felt a physical chemistry first (part of the reason why I made bad choices), and then I looked to see how compatible we were afterward. With Joey, I wasn’t really feeling the chemistry. It was more about the strange magic and the circumstances surrounding her that enamored me. And I knew that if this were to turn into a forever thing, forever is a long time to go without chemistry and deep attraction for someone.

  I asked my sister Candy about it and told her my dilemma. She had been following our progress since the first time I’d called her after our truck-stop meeting, and she was excited to see this next step that Joey and I were taking.

  She asked me, “What if what you really need is something that you don’t know you need?” She continued, “What if what’s on the other side of this is the greatest love and chemistry you’ve ever felt . . . even though you might not feel it right now?”

  I responded, “But what if it isn’t?” Something inside of me was telling me that Joey was the one, but I still wasn’t completely sure. I needed a sign. I wanted one. So I prayed that God would send me a sign. That He would show me, clearly, that she was the one for me.

  I was playing another show at the Bluebird Cafe, and Joey was there with me and Candy. Joey’s mother was in town visiting her and was there also. Near the end of the show, Joey got up and sang “Nothing to Remember” with me. Afterward, she and her mom invited us to come to Joey’s apartment for coffee and some dessert. As we sat in her apartment, we started talking about our childhoods, about how we’d gotten interested in music. Joey said that her mom and dad sang while she was growing up and that her dad played guitar. I said, “My dad played guitar when I was growing up.”

  She said they used to sing songs that she didn’t know . . . songs from long ago that her parents grew up on. I said, “My dad sang songs that I never heard on the radio, songs from long ago too.” Then I asked Joey, “Like, what kinda songs?” And she picked up the guitar sitting by her chair and played the chorus of “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You.”

  My sister started crying. She got up out of the rocking chair where she was sitting and ran to the bathroom. Chills were rolling down my back. Joey stopped singing and said, “What’s wrong?” She had no idea what she had just done. But Candy knew, and so did I.

  My father only knew about ten songs that he played and sang on guitar. He probably knew more, but there were only about ten that he sang most of our childhood. The one we heard the most was Jim Reeves’s “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You.” Recorded originally in the 1950s, Dad sang it our whole lives. And when my father died in 1988, it was the only song played at his funeral. That’s why Candy was crying.

  I never questioned if Joey was the one for me again. Ever. I just trusted that God had brought her into my life for a reason, and He would show me how and why and everything else I needed to know when the time came.

  Within a few weeks Joey and I were talking about marriage. I don’t know why; we just did. We barely knew each other, but we knew we were made for each other and that was enough. Joey wanted to be married. She always had. I would learn that marriage was part of what would make her world complete. And as well as her music or life was going, she wouldn’t be fulfilled until she was a wife with a husband to love and take care of.

  I knew this relationship was different, and to protect it, I wanted to do things differently. Be different. Joey did too. I had a past. A long list of sins and habits that still wanted to be part of my life. Joey had a very short list. She wasn’t perfect. She’d made some mistakes. Had a few regrets, but nothing compared to mine.

  We committed to doing the right thing. To waiting until we were married before we would consummate our relationship. By then, I was almost thirty-seven, and Joey was twenty-six. I had lived a lot of life, and that physical intimacy had been a big part of relationships, and my life, for a long time. I even had two kids. To try to be with someone without “being with” someone wasn’t gonna be easy. But I also knew that’s how God said it was supposed to be. And it was something I’d never tried before.

  Maybe it would make a difference. If we honored Him, maybe He would honor our relationship.

  Thirty-Two

  THE RIGHT LEFT HAND

  I wrote this song about my wife—but I sang it for a few girlfriends before I met her.” That’s how I would always start out singing “Teaching Me How to Love You”—one of the songs that Joey and I would sing for years together onstage each night. And it was true. There were things that I went through with other people . . . hard things . . . that were all for Joey. They were opportunities for me to learn something, so I could be ready when she came along. I didn’t understand it then, but in time I would.

  The first time I brought Joey to our farmhouse, the one that would soon be home to her for the rest of her life, the place was still rough, but she loved it. I had done a good bit of work on it by then to try to make it more livable, and it was. But it was far from nice. Joey told me it was perfect, the kind of house where she could make a life and be happy.

  I wouldn’t understand why until a month or so later when I made the trip to see the house where she grew up and realized who she was, where she came from, and what she was about. Joey wasn’t a cul-de-sac-in-a-suburb-outside-the-city kinda girl. Where the houses all look alike and are right next to each other. She would need space to grow a large garden, hardwood floors that have been lived on, and a porch to see the stars from at night. Like me, she liked character. Old things with charm and pot
ential appealed to her more than new, nice things.

  For the next fourteen years Joey and I could be driving down the road and see a run-down house covered in weeds, with the porch falling off and the tin-roof caved in. Deserted, looking as though it hadn’t been lived in for twenty years, and we’d look at each other and say, “Wow, did you see that?” It wasn’t unusual for us to pull over and walk around, just imagining how life must have been for the families who grew up there and wonder, “How could anyone let this place get so run-down?”

  That’s who Joey was, and I had become very similar.

  We were sitting on the bed next to each other one evening, talking about the future, and I asked her what kind of engagement ring she wanted. She thought about it, then said, “Something old, I think. Maybe something antique that has some personality and history to it.” That’s strange, I thought. Then I remembered something but thought, No, I shouldn’t mention it. But Joey kept talking about how she liked silver and platinum and diamonds that have unique cuts to them. So I got up from the bed and walked across the room to the dresser.

  From the back of my sock drawer, I pulled out a little leather box and nervously carried it over and sat beside her on the bed. “You mean, like this one?” I opened the box, and inside was exactly what she had described. An antique engagement ring from the 1920s made of platinum, with little blue sapphires on the sides and an oval-shaped diamond sparkling on the top. Joey’s eyes lit up.

  “It’s not what you think,” I said. “I bought it for another girl a couple of years ago. I gave it to her. A few times. I was trying to make something terrible work. It ended up being thrown across the floor of an Alan Jackson concert. And I just never figured out what to do with it. I need to take it somewhere and sell it.”

  Joey slowly slid it on her finger . . . and it fit. Perfectly. “Don’t get rid of it,” she said. “I’ll wear it if you ever decide that you want to ask me.”

  What? I thought. What is she talking about? She should be mad at me right now. Pissed that I still even have such a thing or that I would show it to her. Instead, Joey treated me as though I had done something good by buying that ring and hanging on to it . . . as if I had just given it to the wrong person. She made me feel like all the ring needed was time . . . to find the right left hand.

  God, I loved her.

  Thirty-Three

  A CLEAN SLATE

  There comes a time when you have to put your past . . . well, in your past.

  None of it mattered to Joey. She listened as I told her what I’d been through. The terrible things I’d done and the person I’d been. How I had cheated on girls and been cheated on and how I’d made a wreck of my life and others’. She listened, but she didn’t judge. The things I said and confessed hurt her. But not in the way you’d think. They hurt her . . . for me. The tears would roll down her cheeks, and she would tell me how sorry she was that I had to go through all that. That I had to experience those things at all. She never made me feel bad for them. Or for one moment believed that the man I was before was the man that I would be in the future. She just let it all go.

  How do you do that? I had been in plenty of relationships before Joey, and in most of them, we had fought about our pasts. We’d made each other burn photos of past girlfriends or boyfriends and made each other confess things we had done, only to use those confessions against each other like weapons. To destroy the other person when they disappointed us, or when we were feeling jealous or guilty or when we just felt bad about ourselves. Joey wasn’t like that. She just let my past stay in the past . . . and wiped the slate clean.

  “Aren’t you afraid that I might cheat on you?” I said one day when I worked up the nerve to ask.

  “No,” she said. “You chose to be with me. Why would I think you would want to be with someone else?” For her, it was that simple. Everything was.

  Life is black-and-white for Joey. It’s one of her gifts. She doesn’t torture herself with the thousand shades of gray that my mind can go to. She only knows good and bad. Right and wrong. What a gift God has given her. And me, by being beside her.

  It took me a few years to learn to trust her the way she trusted me. It was tough for her to live with me for the first year or so, because I was always afraid she might find someone she loved more than me. That she was attracted to more. But, in time, I learned that all the energy I spent in fear and jealousy was just wasted life. I would come to realize that if Joey said she was going to be somewhere or do something, that’s what she would do. She didn’t lie. Not ever. Who doesn’t lie from time to time? I thought. Or at least stretch the truth? Well . . . her. That’s who. And she would teach me that the things that had drug me down didn’t need to anymore. “If you just tell the truth,” she would say, “you don’t ever have to remember anything.” What a huge difference that little bit of information has made in my life. In fact, all the small, big things she taught me over the years have made all the difference in my life.

  In time, jealousy disappeared from my mind and heart. I don’t know how or when. I just woke up one day, and it was gone. It’s still gone. It’s not in me anymore to be jealous. Joey impacted my character to the core and changed how I’m wired. I’m not saying that I couldn’t screw up and rewire myself in the future and relearn those old habits, but at least I know it’s possible to change . . . to really change. I never knew that before. I figured that what I was, was what I always would be. What I struggled with, I would always struggle with. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

  Love, real love, is stronger than all of that.

  Thirty-Four

  CROSSING OUR HEARTS

  Joey’s home became my home, and my home became hers.

  In mid-April, two months after we started dating, Joey and my girls and I took a trip together to Joey’s hometown in Indiana to spend some time with her mom, dad, and three sisters—Jody, Julie, and Jessie—and to see where Joey had grown up.

  It was dark by the time we exited I-69 and pulled into the driveway. Joey’s mother, June, met us at the door of the late-1800s farmhouse they lived in—the one where Joey was born and had grown up. To say that it was warm and charming and perfect is an understatement. It is a good-sized white-frame house, like ours, with a tin roof and a wood-burning stove in the living room, surrounded by barns and large shade trees outside. Near the biggest barn, the Green Goose—a broken-down 1965 Chevy truck that Joey and all the kids first learned how to drive in—was turning to rust.

  We stepped from a small porch almost immediately into the kitchen. Farm-life paintings and a feed sack lined the walls, and knickknacks filled the shelves above the sink—but not the kind of knickknacks you see in a lot of people’s houses, where they’re just there to make a place look homey. Everything here had a history, its place in the story of the Martins’ lives.

  Joey walked us through the house, and I dropped my bag in the upstairs bedroom that used to be hers. Sparsely decorated with beautiful wallpaper and a small lamp on the bedside table. Her mother came and sat in a rocking chair beside Joey and me. “What are you two up to?” she asked. And we told her.

  We explained that we had been dating for two months and wanted to get married. That I was going to ask Joey’s daddy for permission to take her hand. I think that came as quite a shock to Joey’s mama. She knew that her third daughter had never wanted children, and I had two. Not just two kids . . . two teenage daughters. Something that could make this quick romance story even harder for June and everyone else to believe was a good idea. But she listened as we told her how we had a feeling that God was leading us down this path and that we wanted to honor Him in all our choices. And to honor her and her ex-husband, Jack.

  Joey’s parents had divorced more than a half-dozen years before, after their only son’s death had taken its toll on their family. Justin, a year younger than Joey, was seventeen at the time and was on his way to the county fair that July evening in ’94, when the car accident happened a half mile from their farmhou
se. A car had been parked on the side of the road with no lights on, and Justin’s jeep plowed into the back of it, throwing him from the vehicle, his girlfriend buckled in the passenger seat . . . and Justin without his seat belt.

  Joey and her mama got a call from a neighbor and were two of the first people to arrive at the scene, long before the paramedics. There in that ditch, Joey held her brother’s hand as his lungs struggled to find air, and their mother prayed for God to intervene and save her only son.

  God was busy that night, I guess, or at least that’s how Joey’s daddy looked at it. A week later the doctors told them there was nothing else they could do, and they turned off the machines that had kept him alive. Jack had prayed like he’d never prayed before, and still Justin died.

  Faith was replaced by anger and resentment, and it would be years and years before Jack would reevaluate his faith in God and whether God could actually love us and let our children pass away, right before our eyes. Joey would lead him to that place . . . to the only real peace he’d had in his heart in twenty years. But it cost him, not only those years of his life but hers too.

  Justin’s pictures lined the shelves in the living room, and photo albums were stacked end to end in the hallway. A large white metal cross was installed in the ditch just down the lane where they had prayed over him, to remind them and everyone who drove by that their boy had lived and died on this stretch of Indiana road.

  Joey’s parents never got over their loss and divorced a year or so later. Their relationship had been strained already. June wanted a life of simple living on the small farm they were making payments on, but Jack wanted more. Much more. He would find it in a new wife and a new life eight miles away in town. And June would have the life she loved forever, but without someone to share it with. A compromise, I think, where everyone lost. Especially their kids.