It's All About Him Read Online Free PDF Page B

a smaller package. Then there was another. And another. The last one was a small, black velvet box.
    Oh, that’s so sweet, I thought. It must be a necklace.
    I eased open the velvet lid. Inside was a gleaming, perfect, half-carat diamond solitaire. I stopped breathing.
    â€œDenise,” Alan said softly, “will you marry me?”
    I could not speak. I was shocked. I was too young. Too afraid. Too breathless.
    â€œWell,” Alan said, sensing that maybe things weren’t going quite according to his plan, “you don’t have to tell me now . . .”
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    MY DAD GAVE HIS BLESSING IN A PRETTY LOW-KEY WAY, REPEATING TO ALAN WHAT MY MOTHER’S FATHER HAD SAID TO HIM MANY YEARS BEFORE: “YES, ALAN, YOU CAN HAVE DENISE’S HAND IN MARRIAGE . . . BUT IF YOU EVER GET TIRED OF HER, JUST BRING HER BACK!”
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    I managed to find my breath. “Yes!” I said. “I just don’t want it to be right away.”
    My Parents’ Blessing
    As surprised as my parents were, they were all for it. They had seen how responsible, loving, and determined Alan was. After all, he had worked, saved, and gotten a bank loan in order to give me a car for my high school graduation. Most twenty-year-olds just didn’t do things like that. My dad gave his blessing in a pretty low-key way, repeating to Alan what my mother’s father had said to him many years before: “Yes, Alan, you can have Denise’s hand in marriage . . . but if you ever get tired of her, just bring her back!”
    Mice on the Cake
    The following December, when I was nineteen and a sophomore in college, we were married at the First Baptist Church in Newnan. Although I had grown up in Unity Baptist Church, we had started attending Alan’s church and decided to be married there. The church was decorated for Christmas with two evergreens at the front, both with white lights. The windows were filled with magnolias and greenery, with baskets of red and white flowers on either side of the altar. The massive crystal chandeliers were dimly lit for the evening ceremony, and the church was filled with friends and family.
    Alan wore a black tuxedo with a black bow tie—no Stetson—and according to the wedding announcement in the Newnan Times-Herald, I wore “a formal gown of imported nylon organza”—I never knew that nylon was imported—“with pearled and bugle beaded Chantilly lace.” The local newspaper went on and on: “The long fitted sleeves trimmed with matching lace ended in points at the wrists and the A-lined skirt swept to a full chapel train. The bride wore a fingertip length mantilla and carried a linen handkerchief edged with tatting made by the groom’s maternal grandmother.”
    Just after our vows, Alan turned to me and sang “That’s the Way,” a wedding song by Pat Terry.
    With this ring I thee wed and I give to you my life
Mine is yours and yours is mine
And we can live that way forever
With this kiss we will seal that we now are man and wife
Two in one, one in two
That’s the way it’s got to be
    He may not have been nervous about getting married, but he was nervous about singing in front of our two hundred guests.
    My parents hosted our reception. Since this was a Baptist church wedding in a dry county, there was no alcohol. (Neither of our fathers would have approved of it anyway.) We had homemade cheese straws and mints, mixed nuts, and a traditional white wedding cake with a little plastic bride and groom on top. They looked slightly confused, standing there in the icing, unsure of their future. The groom’s cake was chocolate and decorated with red icing poinsettias and, oddly enough, a mouse bride and a mouse groom on top, standing under an arbor of icing mistletoe. I’m not sure what the little mouse couple had to do with anything, but we were young, and maybe we thought they were cute.
    We spent our first night in Atlanta at the