I've Never Been to Vegas, but My Luggage Has: Mishaps and Miracles on the Road to Happily Ever After

by Hale, Mandy

  The four of us went out to dinner before the dance. I remember looking over at him during dinner and thinking, I could really like this guy. He was so sweet and unassuming and just . . . decent. Even from that first night, I could see what a good soul he had.

  We wound up having a blast at the dance, the four of us rarely sitting out a dance, even when most of our counterparts were standing by the wall in awkward embarrassment. Despite my shyness and quiet nature in high school, I never met a dance floor I didn’t like, and this dance was no exception. It was during “Oh What a Night” that I looked up and realized that Matt’s boutonniere was gone. The weight of the ginormous flower had finally broken it free, and, as I noticed in horror, it had taken a little scrap of Matt’s sweater with it.

  “Oh no!” I exclaimed, causing Matt to jump, despite the volume of the music thumping in our ears.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Your flower! It’s gone,” I said in dismay, pulling back and starting to scan the floor for the massive rose. “I don’t see it anywhere.”

  “Well, it can’t be too hard to find!” Matt said with a grin. “It’s not like it’s hard to miss!”

  The two of us searched high and low for the rose, pushing our way through a conga line, past a couple making out, and under the giant cheesy cardboard arch where our classmates were taking their official pictures to commemorate the night. We were just about to give up when something caught my eye. There, in the middle of a circle of break dancers, being stepped on, danced on, and kicked around, was the runaway boutonniere! I grabbed Matt’s hand, and we inched our way through the throng of guys, who were cheering, whooping, clapping, and fist thrusting, until Matt was able to dash in to the middle of the fray and retrieve the flower. And somehow, despite the pounding feet, the thrashing break dancers, and the gyrating bodies, the rose remained completely unscathed. Matt held it up in the light of the disco ball, and like the great Phoenix, that boutonniere stretched toward the ceiling, mighty and proud and, if possible, bigger than ever! Simultaneously, we looked at each other and broke into hysterical laughter.

  “It’s like the Jason or Freddy Krueger of flowers!” Matt crowed, doubled up in laughter. “This thing cannot be destroyed!”

  It was in a moment of uncontrollable giggling at the Bionic Boutonniere that I think I first started to fall in love with Matt. It was an unfamiliar feeling to me—one that reached out and squeezed my heart in a way that was both painful and wonderful, all at once. And the fact that he had enough fuzz from my sweater on his face to knit another sweater made me fall for him even more. He didn’t care about the monstrously embarrassing boutonniere. He pinned it proudly back on his chest. He didn’t care about making a fool out of himself dancing if that’s what made me happy. He was too rooted in who he was, even at age eighteen, to be swayed or dismayed by looking silly or embarrassing or wrong. He simply didn’t care. That kind of solid confidence and steadiness is hard to come by, particularly in high school.

  And he was also a perfect gentleman. When he took me back to my car that night and we were saying our good nights, he looked me deep in the eyes for a moment before asking, “Would it be okay if I give you a kiss?” Now, at that point in my life, I hadn’t been kissed a lot, and I had certainly never kissed a guy who asked for my permission first. My heart pounding a mile a minute, I nodded a tentative yes. He gave me the sweetest, softest, briefest of kisses before pulling back and smiling at me.

  “Okay, well, I had a wonderful time tonight,” he said, opening my car door and waiting for me to climb in. “Drive safe. I’ll see you later.”

  “You too,” I replied, my heart in my throat. “I’ll see you later.” As I pulled away, I glanced in my rearview mirror and saw him still standing there, leaning against his old beat-up car, purple fuzz from my sweater clinging to his cheeks and a smile on his face bigger than the giant rose still pinned to his chest.

  It was seamless how quickly Matt and I became “Matt and I” after that.

  I had a boyfriend. And not just a boyfriend, but a wonderful boyfriend. A boyfriend who respected me and treated me like a princess and was on the wrestling team and gave me his class ring.

  For the rest of senior year, Matt and I were inseparable. He met my parents; I met his parents. He taught me how to drive a stick shift when my old gray Sentra, which I had nicknamed “Frog,” finally died and my dad bought me a car with a manual transmission. He cheered me on that spring in the senior class play as I proudly took the stage as annoying cheerleader Patty Simcox in the drama club’s production of Grease. I can remember one moment so clearly at the end of the play when we were all sitting on the edge of the stage with our arms around one another, swaying back and forth as we sang the refrain of “We Go Together”: “We’ll always be together! We’ll always be together!” I looked out into the audience at Matt and looked around to my right and my left at my friends and their smiling faces, and I remember thinking to myself, If only this were true. If only we would always be together, just like this, in this happy moment right before we become grown-ups and everything we know changes.

  Little did I know, the changes were only just beginning.

  I was at work one day in late spring at the clothing store Cato, where I worked for much of senior year. I’ll never forget that day in spring 1997, standing in the front of Cato, greeting customers with absolutely no idea about the curveball I was going to be thrown. I couldn’t have been more on top of the world than I was at that moment.

  But my world was about to tilt on its axis.

  Sometime in the afternoon Matt came bursting in to the store with a look on his face I couldn’t quite place. Assuming he was just there to meet me for lunch, I grinned, excited to see him, and ran to give him a hug. He stopped me.

  “We need to talk,” he said earnestly.

  Immediately my heart started to pound. What was going on? He looked so serious. We had just been talking the night before about my prom dress and his tux and how they needed to color coordinate. How could we have gone from that lighthearted conversation to this heavy mood?

  I looked around, beckoning for the other girl greeting that day to come take my place, and ushered Matt outside. We sat side by side on the curb, and he turned to me, taking my hands.

  “I just made a decision that’s going to affect us. Both of us,” he said. “I really hope you’ll be happy about it. But I need you to keep an open mind. Okay?”

  I sat silent for a moment, racking my brain and going through our recent conversations in my mind, trying to figure out what on earth could have happened in the twenty-four hours since we had spoken that had cast this cloud over us and would potentially impact our relationship in what seemed like, from the expression on Matt’s face, a negative way.

  “What is it, Matt? You’re scaring me,” I said finally, squeezing his hand as a way to prompt him to continue.

  He reached up and touched my cheek lightly, his face turning less serious as he realized how alarmed I was becoming.

  “There’s no need to be scared. It’s really not bad,” he said in a reassuring tone. “It’s just . . . big.”

  “Okay . . . ,” I replied, my voice trailing off. “Whatever it is, just tell me.”

  He took both my hands in his and looked down at his lap, like he was searching for the right words to say whatever monumental thing he was trying to tell me. Then he looked at me and smiled.

  “I know I mentioned to you a couple of weeks ago that I met with a marine recruiter. Remember?”

  I nodded slightly, recalling the brief conversation. At the time I had just assumed he had gotten roped into attending one of those standard recruiting meetings that the various branches of the military hold to recruit high school seniors. I never dreamed he was actually considering following up the meeting with action.

  “Well, today I met with the staff sergeant again, the one I told you about that I really liked.” He went on, “And, well, I joined the marines, Mandy. I just signed on
the dotted line about an hour ago.”

  I let my breath out with a whoosh sound. “Oh my gosh! You scared me!” I playfully punched his arm in relief and stood. “I know a lot of guys who have joined the reserves. That’s no big deal at all! It’s just like one weekend out of the month and two weeks in the summer, right?”

  He sat there, strangely silent.

  Even as I rambled on in relief, I started to see a look of worry cross his face. He gazed at me lovingly and took my hand to pull me back down next to him.

  “Mandy, I don’t think you understand,” he said. “I didn’t sign up for the reserves. I signed up for active duty. I’ll be gone for five years.”

  He paused, taking a deep breath before continuing.

  “And I leave for boot camp in a month.”

  Chapter 3

  Long-Distance Love

  In the days that followed, I alternated between great pride that my boyfriend wanted to serve his country and great sadness that he was leaving behind a life with me to pursue his own path. I think it’s probably the struggle that all military girlfriends and wives face. It’s not that you’re not happy, excited, and bursting with love for the person leaving; it’s that you’re struggling with the fact that you’re the one being left behind. And right at the cusp of so many exciting things and new beginnings—prom, graduation, college—it was hard to accept that the most precious relationship of my life was coming to an end. Or at least it felt that way. Of course we had pledged to do the long-distance thing and make our relationship work, but the reality of the situation was, we were both eighteen. We were young. We were still becoming the people we were going to become. And our lives were taking us in two totally different directions.

  Still, we had the excitement of prom to take our minds off of our impending separation, and as the night drew closer, I started to feel better and better about things. So we would deal with a little distance. We could handle it! This was my first love, my first real boyfriend, the guy I hoped to marry someday! Surely there was nothing we couldn’t face down and come out on the other side, right? Sort of like the Bionic Boutonniere from homecoming? I felt confident our relationship could withstand a few hits and still come out unscathed.

  We rented a big stretch limo for prom night, and Matt and I, along with Sherry and David and four or five other couples, rode in style to a fancy restaurant in Nashville before heading to the dance. Prom that year was at the country club in our small town, so we all felt extremely sophisticated to be at such a swanky venue, celebrating our official send-off into the real world and college and everything that being a grown-up entailed. But I quickly discovered that the real world was encroaching on our last night of magic and make-believe when the music started up and Matt refused to take the dance floor with me.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, a bit impatiently. “We never sit on the sidelines at dances.”

  He winced as he settled into his chair, reaching down to massage a calf. “You know I’ve been training with Staff Sergeant Hal to get ready for boot camp,” he explained. “We ran ten miles this morning, and my legs are killing me!”

  I flopped down in the seat beside him, trying hard to be the understanding girlfriend.

  “So you mean we can’t dance . . . at all?” I asked.

  “Sure we can. I just need to rest my legs for a few minutes, and then we’ll be good to go.”

  A few minutes turned into an hour, until I finally gave up and took to the floor with Sherry and our other girlfriends, shooting glances over at Matt, silently willing him to stand up and grab hold of the moment in front of him instead of letting it pass us by. Though it was long before 9/11 and there were no major wars looming, there were still no guarantees when someone left to join the armed forces that they would be coming back. It’s a sacrifice soldiers make, and in turn, a sacrifice soldiers’ families make. I wanted us to live it up on the last night of celebration together, and make memories that would carry us through the next few months of separation while Matt was at boot camp and we wouldn’t be able to even talk on the telephone. And all the while, he was sitting there just watching the precious moments dwindle away. It never occurred to me until later that maybe Matt was scared too. Maybe he didn’t want to get lost in the moment because he knew if he did, the moment would end. Maybe he was sitting on the sidelines watching his peers dance the night away, thinking about the responsibility he had just taken onto his young shoulders. Maybe it felt frivolous and irresponsible to act like a kid when he had just signed away his childhood in favor of becoming a man much earlier than most of those guys shaking their hips on the dance floor would have to.

  But in that moment, none of that occurred to me. In that moment, I was eighteen and saying good-bye to the boy I loved in two weeks, and I just wanted to dance with him one last time.

  So after two hours of watching him sit on the sidelines of our senior prom, I had had enough. In true dramatic teenage-girl fashion, I huffed over to our table and grabbed my clutch. “What are you doing?” Matt asked, but I was too caught up in my own attitude to respond. I shot him a look, then turned on my heel and flounced off, with every intention of storming right out of the country club and, well, from there I wasn’t sure, since the limo was long gone and Matt was supposed to drive me home.

  Unfortunately, in the midst of my diva stomp, I failed to remember that the entire front of the country club was a solid glass wall. Had I not been in such a tizzy, I would have found it odd that I could walk out of the ballroom where prom was and directly into the parking lot. But no, I was trying to prove a point, so I just kept right on huffing toward the parking lot until . . .

  Bang!

  I hit the glass wall so hard, I literally bounced backward and stood wavering back and forth on my feet—much like Tom flailing around in the air after Jerry has run him off a cliff—before tipping backward and falling flat on my back, legs shooting up straight in the air. And of course Matt had followed me out of the ballroom, so he was hot on my heels and saw the entire humiliating episode. Except, instead of being humiliated, I actually started to giggle. And then I started to guffaw. I looked up at Matt, who was standing over me with a horrified look on his face, and started to laugh even harder. Soon he was down on the ground in the middle of the country club floor with me, both of us rolling around in laughter at me in my fancy, sparkly dress, walking headfirst into a glass wall with the force of an angry bull. We laughed and laughed until we were gasping for breath and tears were rolling down our faces. And somewhere in the midst of that laughter, much like the laughter over his giant flower on our first date, the walls came down and the tension eased, and we knew that everything was going to be okay.

  As our laughter started to die down, Matt reached over and pulled me to him fiercely, like he was trying to capture the moment and imprint it on his heart. And in that moment, as we held tightly to each other on the floor of the country club, I think we both accepted that the sweet, innocent, and carefree relationship we had known was over, and a new chapter was beginning.

  Two weeks later Matt left for boot camp.

  I knew it would take some time to get settled in and find time to write me. Finally, two weeks after he left, a letter!

  I ripped it open in excited glee, hardly able to contain myself. And my heart jumped even more when I saw his words there, written in all caps so I grasped the significance of his message and the three little words he was saying to me for the very first time.

  I know it took me some time to say this, but being here and being away from you and finally seeing our relationship clearly, I couldn’t wait another moment to tell you.

  Mandy Hale, I LOVE YOU!

  I laughed and cried and cheered as I read his letter, which detailed his first two weeks of boot camp and everything he had been through. In just two weeks, his entire demeanor and attitude seemed to have changed. He had always been a good, solid, and kindhearted guy; but now he was loving, tender, and open in a way he had never been before. It was like
boot camp had torn down the last remaining walls surrounding his heart, and he had finally and completely let me in!

  Thus started a passionate exchange of letters, sometimes three and four a day. We started to number our letters because we sent so many, and we wanted to make sure we read them in order. Looking back on that time now, it always amazes me to think of the closeness that Matt and I achieved through only the written word. No e-mail, no Facebook, no texting, no phone calls—just good, old-fashioned, handwritten letters. I think that says a lot about how today’s technology that’s designed to bring us closer together might actually be a step or two behind the older form of communication. We poured our hearts and souls into those letters, holding nothing back. Never before, and honestly, never again after those three months of boot camp, did I feel closer to Matt.

  Meanwhile, I was starting my own new beginning. I had just started my freshman fall semester at Middle Tennessee State University, and I was learning to navigate the waters of college life. I stumbled a little as I took those first few steps into adulthood, once again feeling as if I were starting at square one and struggling to fit in. Sherry had enrolled at a nearby community college, and though she was still close by, we no longer shared classes or a workplace or the same bond we had in high school, and that was tough.

  Looking back at that era of my life, here is what I can see now that I couldn’t have possibly seen then: God, in His infinite wisdom, was getting me to a place of complete and utter dependence upon Him. For so long I had looked to exterior things like my friendship with Sherry or my relationship with Matt for my identity and security and worth. And now here I was with no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no boyfriend, or best friend to help me figure out my next step. Outside of my family, I felt completely and utterly alone.