“
Korie’s parents came to the house to see me, and I sat on the couch with Johnny and Chrys. It was not pretty. The argument was so loud that Alan came out of his room. He looked at us and asked, “What in the world is going on?” Johnny was making all of his arguments, and I was acting like a little punk, twisting his words to put them in my favor, which only made him madder and madder.
Johnny told me that according to studies he’d read, 50 percent of all marriages between young people ended in divorce. He had the articles with him to support his arguments.
“So you’re calling that right now?” I asked him. “In all your wisdom, you know we’re going to get divorced?”
“I’m not saying that,” Johnny told me.
“You just said it,” I responded. “You just said half end in divorce. Well, what if we’re the good half?”
Then Johnny went on to say that if we got married, he didn’t want me coming to him for advice. But then later on in the conversation, he told me I could ask him about anything. He was completely irrational, and I, of course, had to point that out to him.
“You just said I couldn’t ask you for advice,” I told him.
He was so mad, I thought he was going to leap off the couch and hit me. Before they left, Johnny looked at me and asked me one last question.
“What’s your plan?” he asked.
“What’s my plan?” I said to him.
“What exactly is your plan?” he said. “Where are you going to work? Where are you going to live?”
“Well, I reckon I’ll just buy a trailer and put it on the back property at Phil’s house,” I told him.
That threw Johnny over the top. He and Chrys stormed out of Alan and Lisa’s house, and I was convinced there was no way they were going to give us their blessing to get married. I called Korie to tell her how the meeting went.
“It went terrible,” I told her. “We were yelling at each other. It was pretty ugly.”
Then Korie had to hang up because her parents were calling her phone. She called me back a few minutes later.
Much to my surprise, her parents told her, “Okay, if you’re determined to do this, we’re going to support you.”
Johnny didn’t say much to me for the next few months, during the planning of the wedding, and I knew Korie’s parents still didn’t like the idea of her getting married so young. I told Phil that Korie’s parents didn’t want us getting married and asked him what I should do.
“Here’s what I’d do,” Phil said, while sitting back in his recliner. “I’d call them up and say, “Y’all missed that. The wedding was last week when we went to the justice of the peace and got married. Y’all missed the whole thing.
”
”