Chapter 6
A Marriage Made In Heaven
The church service was unusually edifying. Pastor Rick’s appearance and countenance had mellowed over the years, helped in part by several extra pounds, a losing battle with the hair gods—he no longer tried to hide his diminished hairline and just shaved his entire head, except for a goatee on his chin and upper lip—and the satisfaction that came from raising ten healthy, happy children with his wife of thirty years. But his sermons never mellowed. Members of Stonelee Christian Fellowship had come to expect Holy Spirit-inspired preaching Sunday after Sunday for the more than twenty years of his tenure at the Fellowship, and visitors were either blown away by the unassailable truth in his preaching or driven away by the open spiritual wounds his sermons exposed.
This particular service had been surprisingly moving even to the members who always found Pastor Rick’s sermons challenging. It had been preceded by the most spectacular praise and worship music they had heard in a long time. A guest performer had raised the roof and the entire Johnson clan was feeling jovial as each of them walked out of the church and to their cars.
After buckling into his white Chevy Suburban, with his wife Nancy sitting by his side and the vehicle otherwise empty, Charles Fleming, the grandfatherly figure of the family, commented to his wife, Nancy, “I was so blessed to meet you.” He smiled widely through his fleshy face. His head was bald on top, and it perched on a very tall and rather rotund girth, though not so large as to detract from his odd cowboy/preppy aura—khaki slacks, slick and smooth tie, freshly cleaned and pressed blue blazer, and ostrich-skin boots. He completed the look with his black Stetson cowboy hat that he laid on the center console each time he sat down in what he called his “truck.”
Nancy reached over the center console, just behind where the hat rested, and gently took hold of Charles’s hand, squeezing it out of affection for the man of her dreams. She considered how incredibly lucky she was to be married to such a man. He was a well-respected attorney practicing criminal defense in Derby, Kansas, and she was a humble cosmetologist in a hole-in-the-wall salon in the very same city.
It was fate, Nancy was certain. Chuck—Nancy’s nickname for her love—had a regular barber he had used for more than twenty years. On the fateful day their paths crossed for the first time, he arrived at the barber shop for his weekly hair cut and found the door locked with a sign reading, Gone for the week due to a death in the family. It was a big week for Chuck; he was in the middle of a major jury trial and looked forward to the psychological boost a clean cut and shave would give him.
After reading the sign and vainly attempting to change fate by rattling the door as if the mice and cockroaches behind it would open up and let him in, he let out a frustrated grunt, “You’ve got to be kidding!”
He backed up and looked up and down the retail strip center that the barber shop was smack in the middle of. Then fate caught his eye. The sign read Sue’s Cut ‘n Curl. He’d never lowered himself to a so-called “beauty shop cut” before, but he was determined to get his hair cut so he walked the three doors to the left to give it a shot. Upon further reflection, he knew it couldn’t be too difficult to trim the little hair he had remaining on the sides and back of his head, and the top was as bald as the moon, so he walked over to the ultra-small, two chair salon and took a chance. After opening the door he was greeted warmly by an attractive lady who looked to be in her late-forties to early-fifties, probably no older than he.
“Welcome,” the reddish-blond haired lady said with a smile. “Is this your first time here?”
“Sure is,” he replied. “You have any openings?” he almost demanded. “I’ve got about an hour before I gotta be in court.”
Nancy was at first put off by Chuck’s commanding presence. Indeed, as far as she was concerned, he was in no position to demand anything. What a pompous jerk, she initially thought. She saw him as a fairly ugly man—fat, bald, and the last guy she would let buy her a drink, let alone marry. However, she needed the money, and her income consisted mostly of commissions and tips she got from cutting hair in the rented chair at Sue’s, so she faked it and pretended to be pleased to meet the man who would turn out to be her future husband.
She motioned him to her chair, and replied, “I can fit you in.”
He sat down and she shook out a smock and placed it around his neck, fastening it loosely behind the bulky mass, resisting the temptation to pull it too tight for comfort. She began her normal routine of spraying his hair with mists of water—normally, she would’ve shampooed it, but he had told her time was of the essence so she didn’t bother. She combed the moistened hair straight, slicing the air with her scissors before she began running her fingers through his hair and trimming it ever-so-gently. She laughed to herself (only letting a slight grin appear on her face, which was clearly reflected back in the mirror she and Chuck were looking into) as she vainly tried to follow this routine with the few strands of hair that still grew on her new client’s head.
“You from around here?” she asked, chitchatting. Who knows? Maybe he’ll give me a good tip, she thought. It had just dawned on her that an attorney with money was sitting in front of her.
“Yeah,” he said abruptly, and then he refocused his thoughts on mentally reviewing the opening statement he would soon deliver to the jurors and judge.
Come on, Nancy thought. I’m just making pleasant conversation to pass the time. Why the attitude? For a second or two she wondered why in the world she had chosen cosmetology as her second career. Then she reminded herself that the first one, waiting tables, really wasn’t a career at all.
“What kind of lawyer are you?”
“Mostly criminal defense,” he said, “with a little civil law on the side.”
Really?” she replied, a little shocked. “I never met a criminal defense lawyer before. I like Matlock. Ever watch it?”
Chuck almost answered, “If you only knew that most professional criminal defense lawyers would take offense at such a question!” Matlock was anything but real, and it gave the average Joe—and potential juror—the impression that good defense attorneys only represented innocent clients. The truth, Chuck knew, couldn’t be further from the myth. Indeed, excellent lawyers like Chuck had memorized a mantra that they casually referred to as the Defense Attorney’s Prayer: “God, please save me from an innocent client.” After twenty years in private practice, following ten years in the public defender’s office, Chuck could count the number of truly innocent clients on two fingers, out of literally hundreds. Fortunately for him, the innocent ones walked, and many of the guilty ones did, too. The latter truth Chuck had learned to justify as the product of his solemn duty “to defend the Constitution,” but the true fallout of such a career had been alcohol abuse and a dysfunctional family that had very little desire to spend with its husband and father.
Chuck reflected on his wasted life while Nancy snipped away. He wondered how his dearly departed wife had really felt about his absences, whether her death only two years before had brought her relief from her husband’s drunken rages and her fearful declines into depression and sorrow. He considered whether his daughter’s choice to remain celibate and become a nun in the Catholic Church was more an attempt to avoid marrying a man like Daddy than a reflection of her faith in God. He had more regrets and reasons now to get drunk and jump off a bridge than ever before. So why put up with this mess?
Meanwhile, waiting for a reply from her new customer, hoping it would build rapport between her and her new client, she pressed him for an answer. “Do you watch Matlock?” she said again, interrupting his depressing thoughts.
Chuck looked up at Nancy’s reflection in the mirror and grinned. “Actually, I do. I’ve seen just about every episode. It’s more comedy than courtroom drama, though. Don’t believe everything you see.”
As he looked at her reflection, he thought he saw a twinkle in her eyes, a spark of recognition. In a way, she reminded him of Bever
ly, his dead wife, but not the cold and bitter Beverly who died of breast cancer after living with a drunk for most of her life; rather, the Beverly he met while attending law school in Lawrence, Kansas. Since her death, he hadn’t so much as carried on a friendly conversation with a woman, so the twinkle startled him somewhat.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Nancy.”
“I’m Charles.”
The ice was broken, and for the next ten-or-so minutes they carried on a warm and friendly conversation, punctuated by awkwardness not unlike the kind felt by two teenagers discovering an interest in the opposite sex for the first time. After the haircut was finished and Chuck paid the tab—with an additional twenty dollar tip to boot—he asked her out for coffee the next week, and she said yes. The substance of the man—at least what she could rather in a ten-minute time span—had overwhelmed his previously unpalatable style. A courtship followed soon thereafter, and they were married just six months later.
Was it her beauty that had attracted him to her, or perhaps her personality? Neither, he knew. It was something much deeper. They would speak to each other on the telephone for hours on end, and sometimes would linger in Chuck’s Cadillac after their dates ended, just talking about life, about where they had been and where they hoped to be tomorrow. Chuck was amazed by how spiritually and emotionally intact Nancy was after dealing with the death of her first husband, losing herself in alcoholism and a less-than-admirable lifestyle immediately afterwards, then piecing it all back together after becoming a grandmother and surrogate parent at the same time. To think that it all came down to what he called “church” and to finally giving in to her daughter’s desire for her to get a piece of what she had experienced—to live for God instead of herself—was amazing, he conceded.
“When did it hit you?” he said on a moonlit night the week before he proposed marriage, a mere five months after the haircut.
“What?”
“The realization that God was the answer.”
“I was bitter,” she shared as she stared out of the Sedan de Ville’s sunroof, seat reclined, and fully pondered the question. “Jessie knew it right off the bat; the moment Pastor Rick told her that Christ was the answer, that He could shoulder her pain. She immediately accepted Him as her Lord and Savior. Me? I just knew it couldn’t be that easy. After all we’d been through, just one awful thing after another, God was the last person I wanted to talk to.”
“So what happened to change you?”
“Jessie changed,” Nancy replied, as the moon reflected off pools of tears that were building in her eyes. “And not because everything got better after she accepted Christ. Things got worse, actually, at least for a while. Her boys got into trouble in school almost every day, she had to cut back at work, which made things much tougher financially, and I was mad at her all the time.”
“How did she change?”
She looked up at the stars and pondered the question as if she needed time to get the answer right, and then looked back at him.
“Instead of judging me, staying bitter at the boys for the trouble they were always getting into, and lashing out, she reached out.” Nancy almost blubbered she was so touched by her recollections. “She loved us, hugged us, and did everything she could to take care of us, no matter how difficult things got. That did something to me that I can’t really explain, and the boys, too.”
“When did you change?” Chuck begged. “I see that in you. I mean, I couldn’t even look at another woman after Beverly died until I met you. I drank all the time, forgot about clients, got in trouble with the legal ethics committee, and almost lost everything to booze, until I met you.”
“It sounds simple, but it really wasn’t,” she replied. “One Sunday Pastor Rick spoke to me, not literally, but I felt his message go right to my heart. There was this Scripture, something about what Jesus said, “My burden is light.” I had been carrying so much on my shoulders for so long. I wanted something lighter, someone to help me with the weight of everything. So I went forward during the altar call, and Rick led me to Christ.”
“Was it immediate?” Chuck asked, now appearing eager to know the secret, to get a piece of what Nancy had.
“Part of the feeling was. I knew I could make it through anything, no matter how tough, but part wasn’t. I don’t think anything is supposed to be easy. Maybe God wants us to struggle some so that we will go to Him all the time, not just when it suits our fancy.”
This girl’s amazing, he thought.
On that night sitting in Nancy’s driveway, Chuck felt hope in his heart for the first time, hope for a fulfilling life without Becky, alcohol, or whatever other destructive appetites he had been nurturing to get through another hopeless day.
After he proposed marriage, she made him go to church with her; the “yes” was contingent on him being counseled, including both marital and personal counseling with Pastor Rick, and his acceptance of Christ as his Lord and Savior. It didn’t take much convincing. He not only desired to spend the rest of his life with Nancy, but he hungered for the spiritual depth that she and her family had. So, just one week before the marriage, he went forward and made the same affirmation that Nancy’s family had made long before. And ever since, Charles Fleming found himself seeking more and more of God, and less and less of himself. Life had never been so good.
Broken: A story of hope and forgiveness Page 9
