If I Loved You

“I’m pregnant.”

Of course, I already knew this. She had told Jobie and he had told me. Still, not the kind of news a single man wants to hear from a woman he knows only casually and is not even sure he likes.

I wasn’t really in the market for a family. I had thrown away a perfectly good one. Musicians are notoriously unreliable husbands and dads.

“So what do you want to do?”

“I’m going to have the baby.” She said this defensively, as if expecting me to pressure her to have an abortion. Actually the thought had not occurred to me. To my shame, I must admit I would have been open to the suggestion had she made it.

“And you’re sure it’s mine (once more, to my shame)?”

“I haven’t been with anybody but you.” She was still defensive and a little upset at the implication of my question. I didn’t press it.

She was young, 23, when we first met, kinda skinny but with a cute butt. I usually tired of women quickly but there was an innocence about her that had nothing to do with age or experience. I found this attractive somehow. Not what you ordinarily see in the nightclubs.

So I said, “Okay, we’ll see,” and she kept coming around all summer to the Old House, the converted shotgun house where I had spent most of my childhood and where I was living my bachelor’s existence.

She brought herself, when she came and whatever party goods she could lay her hands on. The price of admission, I guess you’d say.

As I mentioned, I had some hard experiences with women, most of them of my own making, and really didn’t care to have one around on a steady basis. Plus, she was pretty messed up the first time we met and it later came out she was a junkie.

I quit seeing her for a bit but she was quite persistent and I wasn’t seeing anyone else at the time. Or looking for anyone else.

So she would show up at the Old House two or three times a week, always calling ahead, although I could hear the ’63 Mercury she drove squeaking and rattling from a mile away. My brother and me and our friends would party at the Old House and she would show up. Everybody began to know her name and talk to her, especially the girls. It was taken for granted that the baby growing in her belly was mine.

By early autumn the band was playing again at a couple of clubs. She came to hear us play and sat at the band table. She and Alma, the guitar player’s wife and our keyboardist, became as thick as thieves. She was swelled way out there by then. Wayne, the club owner, would always joke when he saw her that he would probably be the one to deliver the baby, there in the club.

The baby arrived in January. Her sister called me that afternoon and asked if I would like to travel to Memphis to see my new daughter. Amazing, isn't it, how a newborn child with her tiny squished-up face can so closely resemble the family from which she comes. Sandy was the the spitting image of my dad with his round face and chubby cheeks.

Amazing as well, how one accustomed to and desiring a solitary existence can begin to desire something more.

Motels became part of our weekend existence for the next several months as the Old House in winter was not a good place to keep an infant. And we were a family on those weekends; mom, dad and baby in her dresser-drawer bassinet.

In June the confirmed bachelor became a family man when I moved Joyce and Sandy in with me.

We made it official in November of '88, mom and dad becoming wife and husband. And so we remained until one night almost thirty years to the night we met, she died in her sleep.

It strikes me, as I reflect on it, how some seem born with kind and loving hearts while others of us must be taught to reach outside ourselves, to love. What a sweet, beautiful lesson it is to be so taught. What a mercy is such a blessing to one so undeserving.

And I would say that, other than my salvation, it is the greatest kindness my Lord and God has extended to me.

And so Joyce Wanda Tolar, if you were here I would kiss you and wish you happy anniversary. That not being possible, I'll have to wait on that kiss and say, “See you soon.”