by Ree Drummond
I didn’t have an answer for him there. But deep down, I knew that, somehow, gravy would come into play.
I had nothing against Father Johnson’s questions. And they were good questions—for a late-night game of quarters with a room full of friends looking for deep conversation, they were great. But there was just something about them that didn’t seem applicable to Marlboro Man and me, or any couple who loved each other and was willing to jump into a life together and take a chance. Some of the questions seemed obvious—things we already knew and really didn’t need to formally discuss. Some of them seemed premature—things we shouldn’t necessarily already know but would figure out as we go along. Some of them were painfully vague.
“How much do you know about each other?” was Father Johnson’s final question of the day.
Marlboro Man and I looked at each other. We didn’t know everything yet; we couldn’t possibly. We just knew we wanted to be together. Was that not enough?
“Well, I’ll speak for myself,” Marlboro Man said. “I feel like I know all I need to know in order to be sure I want to marry Ree.” He rested his hand on my knee, and my heart leapt. “And the rest…I figure we’ll just handle it as we go along.” His quiet confidence calmed me, and all I could think about anyway was how long it would take me to learn how to drive my new lawn mower. I’d never mowed a lawn before in my life. Did Marlboro Man know this? Maybe he should have started me out with a cheaper model.
Just then Father Johnson stood up to bid us farewell until our session the following week. I picked up my purse from its spot next to my chair.
“Thank you, Father Johnson,” I said, standing up.
“Wait just a second,” he said, holding up his hands. “I need to give you a little assignment.” I’d almost made a clean getaway.
“I want you both to show me how much you know about each other,” he began. “I want you both to make me a collage.”
I looked at him for a moment. “A collage?” I asked. “Like, with magazine pictures and glue?”
“That’s exactly right,” Father Johnson replied. “And it doesn’t have to be large or elaborate; just use a piece of legal-size paper as the backdrop. I want you to fill it with pictures that represent all the things you know about the other person. Bring it to your session next week, and we’ll look at them together.”
This was an unexpected development.
I made the mistake of glancing at Marlboro Man, who I imagined had never felt more uncomfortable in his life than he did once he faced the prospect of sitting down and working with paper and glue in an effort to prove to someone else how much he knew about the woman he was going to marry. He tried to keep a straight face, to remain respectful, but I’d studied his beautiful features enough to know when things were going on under the surface. Marlboro Man had been such a good sport through our series of premarital training. And this—a collage assignment—was his reward.
I put on a happy face. “Well, that’ll be fun!” I said, enthusiastically. “We can sit down and do it together sometime this week….”
“No, no, no…,” Father Johnson scolded, waving his hands at me. “You can’t do it together. The whole point is to independently sit down and make the collage without the other person present.”
Father Johnson was awfully bossy.
We shook hands, promised to bring our assignments to the following week’s appointment, and made our way to the parking lot. Once out of the church doors, Marlboro Man swatted me.
“Ow!” I shrieked, feeling the sting. “What was that for?”
“Just your Tuesday spanking,” Marlboro Man answered.
I smiled. I’d always loved Tuesday.
We hopped in the pickup, and Marlboro Man started the engine. “Hey,” he said, turning to me. “Got any magazines I can borrow?” I giggled as Marlboro Man pulled away from the church. “I could use some glue, too,” he added. “I don’t think I have any at my house.”
WEDDING PLANS moved ahead at a rapid pace. I decided on the cake, bought my wedding shoes, firmed up the reception menu, sent the country band its deposit, and pulled my mom away from her marital crisis long enough for the two of us to meet with the flower people so we could firm up the orchids and the daisies. I attended showers thrown by friends of my parents—none of whom had any idea that their longtime buddies’ marriage was a shambles. I began packing my belongings in preparation for my move to my new home on the ranch, much as I’d packed to move—permanently, I thought at the time—to Chicago. It felt surreal, knowing I’d soon be living with the man of my dreams, and that I’d soon be leaving my childhood home for the last time.
I resumed Tuesday-night dinners with Ga-Ga, Delphia, Dorothy, and Ruthie, soaking up their small-town conversation as if my life—and my eventual survival in my new locale—depended on it.
I loved those dinners.
Chicken-fried steak had never tasted so good.
In the meantime, Marlboro Man was working his fingers to the bone. To prepare for our three-week honeymoon to Australia, he’d rearranged the schedule of many goings-on at the ranch, compressing a normally much longer shipping season into a two-week window. I could sense a difference in his work; his phone calls to me were fewer and farther between, and he was getting up much earlier than he normally did. And at night, when he did call to whisper a sweet “good night” to me before his head hit the pillow, his voice was scratchy, more weary than normal. He was working like a dog.
In the midst of all of this, the deadline for our collage assignment loomed. It was Monday evening before our Tuesday get-together with Father Johnson, and I knew neither Marlboro Man nor I had gotten around to our respective collages. There was just too much going on—too many cows, too many wedding decisions, too many cozy movies on Marlboro Man’s tufted leather couch. We had way too much romance to take care of when we were together, and besides that, Father Johnson had explicitly told us we couldn’t work on the collages in each other’s presence. This was fine with me: sitting upright at a table and cutting out magazine photos was the last thing I wanted to do with such a fine specimen of a human. It would have been a criminal misuse of our time together.
Still, I didn’t want to show up for the meeting empty-handed, so that night at my parents’ house I holed up in my room, resolving not to come out until I completed my Father Johnson “How Well Do You Know Your Fiancé?” collage. I dug around in the upstairs storage room of my parents’ house and grabbed the only old magazines I could find: Vogue. Golf Digest. The Phoebe Cates issue of Seventeen.
Perfect. I was sure to find a wealth of applicable material. This is so dumb, I thought just as my bedroom phone rang loudly. It had to be Marlboro Man.
“Hello?” I answered.
“Hey,” he said. “What’re you doing?” He sounded pooped.
“Oh…not much,” I answered. “What about you?”
“Well…,” he began, his voice sounding heavy…serious. “I’ve got a little bit of a problem.”
I didn’t know everything about Marlboro Man. But I knew enough to know that something was wrong.
WHAT IS IT?” I asked, pasting a magazine photo of a football—found in an old Seventeen magazine spread—on my beloved’s collage.
“Well, a bunch of cattle trucks just showed up,” he said, trying to talk over the symphonic mooing of cows all around him. “They were supposed to get here tomorrow night, but they showed up early….”
“Oh, no…that’s a bummer,” I said, not quite sure what he was getting at.
“So now I’ve got to work all these cattle tonight and get ’em shipped…and by the time I get done, the store in town will be closed,” he began. Our appointment with Father Johnson was at ten the next morning. “So I think I’m just going to have to come over there really early tomorrow morning and do the thing at your house,” Marlboro Man said. I could hardly hear him through the cattle.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “What time were you thinking of coming over?” I braced myself
for the worst.
“I was thinking around six or so,” he said. “That would give me plenty of time to get it done before we go.”
Six? In the morning? Ugh, I thought. I have only one more week of sleeping in. After we’re married, there’s no telling what time I’ll have to get out of bed.
“Okay,” I said, my voice dripping with trepidation. “I’ll see you in the morning. Oh, and hey…if I don’t answer the door right away it probably means I’m doing some weight training or something.”
“Gotcha,” Marlboro Man answered, humoring me. “And hey—don’t pull any muscles or strain yourself. We’re getting married in less than a week.”
My stomach fluttered as I hung up the phone and resumed work on my collage. I decided to really go for it and pretend I was back in sixth grade, when I’d been given a similar “About Me” collage assignment by my teacher, Mrs. Stinson. Back then I’d spent over a week cutting the guts out of old ballet magazines, painstakingly gluing pictures of Gelsey Kirkland, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and so many of the other ballet greats I idolized at that time, and adorning the cracks and borders of the collage with images of pointe shoes, tutus, tiaras, ballet bags, and leg warmers. Ballet had been my life then, just as it had remained all the way through school. It had been my one and only focus until boys came into the picture, and even they’d had to fight ballet for my time, energy, and attention.
I worked into the night, reminiscing about my past while constructing a collage about the man of my future, and felt pangs of bittersweet nostalgia for the way I’d felt in the sixth grade when I was making that ballet collage, and in seventh, and in eighth, when my only thought of tomorrow was which color comb I’d stick into the back pocket of my Lee jeans, back when my parents were together and in love. When I was so blissfully unaware that a splintering family could hurt so very much.
I worked and worked, and before I knew it, my collage was finished. Still damp from Elmer’s glue, the masterpiece included images of horses—courtesy, coincidentally, of Marlboro cigarette ads—and footballs. There were pictures of Ford pickups and green grass—anything I could find in my old magazines that even remotely hinted at country life. There was a rattlesnake: Marlboro Man hated snakes. And a photo of a dark, starry night: Marlboro Man was afraid of the dark as a child. There were Dr Pepper cans, a chocolate cake, and John Wayne, whose likeness did me a great favor by appearing in some ad in Golf Digest in the early 1980s.
My collage would have to do, even though it was missing any images depicting the less tangible things—the real things—I knew about Marlboro Man. That he missed his brother Todd every day of his life. That he was shy in social settings. That he knew off-the-beaten-path Bible stories—not the typical Samson-and-Delilah and David-and-Goliath tales, but obscure, lesser-known stories that I, in a lifetime of skimming, would never have hoped to read. That he hid in an empty trash barrel during a game of hide-and-seek at the Fairgrounds when he was seven…and that he’d gotten stuck and had to be extricated by firefighters. That he hated long pasta noodles because they were too difficult to eat. That he was sweet. Caring. Serious. Strong. The collage was incomplete—sorely lacking vital information. But it would have to do for now. I was tired.
My phone rang at midnight, just as I was clearing my bed of the scissors and magazines and glue. It was Marlboro Man, who’d just returned to his home after processing 250 head of cattle in the dark of night. He just wanted to say good night. I would forever love that about him.
“What’ve you been doing tonight?” he asked. His voice was scratchy. He sounded spent.
“Oh, I just finished up my homework assignment,” I answered, rubbing my eyes and glancing at the collage on my bed.
“Oh…good job,” he said. “I’ve got to go get some sleep so I can get over there and get after it in the morning….” His voice drifted off. Poor Marlboro Man—I felt so sorry for him. He had cows on one side, Father Johnson on the other, a wedding in less than a week, and a three-week vacation in another continent. The last thing he needed to do was flip through old issues of Seventeen magazine for pictures of lip gloss and Sun-In. The last thing he needed to deal with was Elmer’s glue.
My mind raced, and my heart spoke up. “Hey, listen…,” I said, suddenly thinking of a brilliant idea. “I have an idea. Just sleep in tomorrow morning—you’re so tired….”
“Nah, that’s okay,” he said. “I need to do the—”
“I’ll do your collage for you!” I interrupted. It seemed like the perfect solution.
Marlboro Man chuckled. “Ha—no way. I do my own homework around here.”
“No, seriously!” I insisted. “I’ll do it—I have all the stuff here and I’m totally in the zone right now. I can whip it out in less than an hour, then we can both sleep till at least eight.”
As if he’d ever slept till eight in his life.
“Nah…I’ll be fine,” he said. “I’ll see you in the morning….”
“But…but…,” I tried again. “Then I can sleep till at least eight.”
“Good night…” Marlboro Man trailed off, probably asleep with his ear to the receiver.
I made the command decision to ignore his protest and spent the next hour making his collage. I poured my whole heart and soul into it, delving deep and pulling out all the stops, marveling as I worked at how well I actually knew myself, and occasionally cracking up at the fact that I was doing Marlboro Man’s premarital homework for him—homework that was mandatory if we were to be married by this Episcopal priest. But on the outside chance Marlboro Man’s tired body was to accidentally oversleep, at, at least he wouldn’t have to walk in the door of Father Johnson’s study empty-handed.
I WAS AWAKENED at dawn to the sound of Marlboro Man knocking on the front door. A rancher through and through, he’d made good on his promise to show up at six. I should have known. He’d probably gotten fewer than five hours of sleep.
I stumbled down the stairs, trying in vain to steady myself so I’d look like I’d been awake for longer than seven seconds. When I opened the door he was there, in his Wranglers, looking impossibly appealing for someone so profoundly sleep-deprived. The sweetness of his gentle grin was matched only by his adorably puffy eyes, which made him look like a little boy despite the steel gray hair on his head. My stomach fluttered; I wondered if there’d ever be a time when it would stop.
“Good morning,” he said, stepping inside the door and nuzzling his face into my neck. A thousand tiny feathers tickled my skin.
Marlboro Man announced that he was ready to get to work on the collage; I smiled as we headed upstairs. I immediately made a beeline for the bathroom, where I manically brushed my teeth with Close-Up. Twice. I was wearing pajamas. My eyes were puffy. I looked like a woman twice my age. When I finally walked out into the bedroom, primped as I could hope to be at six in the morning, Marlboro Man was standing near my bed, holding the two collages in his hands and looking them over.
“Oh, you’re in big trouble,” he said, holding up the collage I’d made on his behalf.
“In trouble?” I smiled. “With you or Father Johnson?”
“Both,” he said, lunging at me and tackling me onto the bed. “You were not supposed to do that.” I laughed and tried to wriggle loose. He tickled my ribs. I screamed.
Three seconds later, when he felt I’d been adequately punished, we sat up and propped our heads against the pillows of my bed. “You did not do my homework assignment for me,” he said, grabbing the collage again and looking it over.
“I had insomnia,” I said. “I needed a creative activity.” Marlboro Man looked at me, seemingly unsure of whether to kiss me, thank me…or just tickle me some more.
I didn’t give him a chance. Instead I picked up the collage and took Marlboro Man on a tour so he’d be prepared for our appointment.
“Here’s a pack of cigarettes,” I said. “Because I used to smoke in college.”
“Uh-huh,” he answered. “I knew that.”
“And here’s a glass of white wine,” I continued. “Because…I love white wine.”
“Yes, I’ve noticed,” Marlboro Man answered. “But…won’t Father Johnson have a problem with that being on there?”
“Nah…,” I said. “He’s Episcopalian.”
“Got it,” he said.
I continued with my collage orientation, pointing out the swatch of my favorite shade of turquoise…the pug…the ballet shoe…the Hershey’s Kiss. He watched and listened intently, prepping himself for Father Johnson’s upcoming grilling. Gradually the earliness of the morning and the cozy warmth of my bedroom got the better of us, and before we knew it we’d sunk into the irresistible softness of my bed, our arms and legs caught in a tangled maze.
“I think I love you,” his raspy voice whispered, his lips nearly touching my ear. His arms wrapped even more tightly around my body, swallowing me almost completely.
We woke up just in time to make our 10:00 A.M. appointment. Ironically, after all the last-minute cramming, Father Johnson barely asked us about the specifics of the collages. Instead we spent most of our time walking around the sanctuary and preparing for the upcoming rehearsal. As much as I loved Father Johnson, I was more than excited that this would be our last official meeting together before he finally got down to business and married us. We wound up passing our Father Johnson test with flying colors…feeling only slightly guilty that we’d cheated on our homework.
There wasn’t much time for guilt, anyway; the wedding was five days away.
Chapter Twenty
A FACEFUL OF DYNAMITE
I HAD A list of wedding tasks a mile long: bridesmaid gifts, luncheons, catering decisions…and trying to keep everything happy and peaceful between my parents, who’d lost the ability to conceal the fact that the tension between them had reached an all-time high. Their marriage was hemorrhaging, getting worse every day. Any childlike notion I’d had that the hope and optimism of my impending wedding would somehow transform and rescue their marriage, would turn everything around, had turned out to be a foolish pipe dream. The plane had lost power; it was going down fast. I just hoped it wouldn’t hit the ground before I walked down the aisle.
