What He's Been Missing

“So when are you thinking about doing this?” I asked, already envisioning these two jumping the broom at an old plantation house in the North Georgia Mountains where their entire family could stay over the night before. I looked up from the pad I’d been writing on. “I only do one wedding a season—it allows me to focus. Your trade slot is in the winter. Any dates you’ve been considering?” I looked directly at Dawn. Usually the brides had such details.

But A. J. answered, “Well, we were considering New Year’s Eve.”

“Yes. One year exactly from the engagement,” Dawn added.

“I see. Well, I don’t commonly take appointments during the holidays,” I said. “It’s a personal limitation. I try to keep that time open so I can spend it with family. Friends. You understand?”

“Oh . . . We didn’t even think of that,” Dawn said. “Of course.” She laughed. “Why wouldn’t you? While we were out getting engaged on New Year’s Eve, you were probably out somewhere fabulous. A ball with your”—she looked at my bare ring finger—“boyfriend?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “But—”

The magical couple looked into me with eager, hopeful eyes. I so, too, wanted to be playing on their team.

“But—close.” (What was that?)

“Ohhh!” they both gasped.

“I knew it!” A. J. said. “You probably have half the guys in the city chasing you. The one you love is so lucky.”

“That was so sweet to say,” Dawn said to A. J. She turned and kissed him on the cheek.

He leaned into her and put his hand over her hand on his leg.

“We understand,” Dawn went on. “You have to keep some limitations. We were just thinking: it’s a new year, and we want to have the wedding on that day to symbolize our new life. Us starting out together, as a family, in our new lives.”

When Dawn said “family,” the twosome nestled closer together.

“We’ll just think of another date,” A. J. said. “Maybe in October?”

I hate the entire month of October. It’s a month of nothing. It comes in between the beautiful unraveling of summer in September and the final push of fall in November. Basically, all it does is hold people waiting until its very last day so they can dress up like demons and witches. It was an in-between thing. A. J. and Dawn were on to something. They needed a beginning.

“I’ll look into some things,” I said before Dawn could answer A. J.’s question about October. “See what I can do about New Year’s.”

“Really?” Dawn looked like she was about to pop out of her seat and hug me. “Seriously? For us?”

“Yes. I’ll see about it. I’ll give you two a call later this week to confirm.”

Dawn jumped out of her seat. She came around to my seat and hugged me tightly.

“I just had to give you a hug. Thank you so much,” she said, pulling me to my feet.

Then A. J. came around, too, and all three of us were hugging.

“Thank you,” he said.

“It’s no problem, really,” I said in their embrace.

“Thank you.”

“Thank you.”

I felt like we’d all just gotten engaged.

My first love had driven a red Ford pickup truck—big time in Social Circle in 1990. His name was Cha

uncey Billups. He was big and strong and so black Grammy Annie-Lou wouldn’t let him sit on our front steps—in the country, after you pass a certain age, sitting on a girl’s front step is a sign you’re courting her and Grammy Annie-Lou wasn’t having that. When I was thirteen, Grammy Annie-Lou told me Chauncey and his people were too “damn black and country”—all that when his house was less than a mile from ours, which in Social Circle meant our families once lived on the same plantation. They just lived a little farther back from the Irving plantation house that was now separated from the rest of our homes by fences and dirt roads and served as a museum and café for visitors coming to Social Circle to buy sweet onions and see the “old South.”

Grammy Annie-Lou’s house was closer to the plantation because her grandfather had been the blacksmith for old “master” Redeem Irving, whom he’d actually grown up with, and had become his card partner who always “won low”—how they say we got our last name. Family myth says Reedem and my great-great-grandfather were actually half-brothers. Chauncey Billups’s family lived farther from the house. His great-great-grandparents were sharecroppers and every line of his family since were farmers—he’d actually be the first in his family to go to college when he left Social Circle to go to the University of Georgia and become an agricultural scientist. Well, Grammy Annie-Lou didn’t know anything about the University of Georgia being in Chauncey’s future when we were fifteen and making eyes at each other in school. And she didn’t want to hear anything about “that black Billups boy.” But, as they say, “What you want the least will come to you the easiest.” I was my mother’s only child. She died when I was just three months old. Social Circle in the 1980s was like the rest of the world in the 1880s, so my father immediately tried to marry someone else, but it didn’t work. His heart was too broken so he went home to live with his mama. By the time I was a teenager, I was ready to rebel and tired of the two of them fawning all over me. Chauncey was just what I wanted.