Color Blind(60)

Over the course of the next week, we hired a moving company to help me pack up her house. Nevaeh finally returned to school and was happy to be back. She was even more excited to move into Dale’s humongous house and bragged about it to all of her friends. For once, things seemed to be looking up for everyone. After we were all moved in and settled, I thought about our upcoming wedding.



“Dale, I wanted to talk to you about the wedding,” I said as he came in from work one evening.



“What about it?”



“I would really like to be married before the baby’s born, but I’m worried that I won’t have enough time to plan everything,” I confessed.



“Hm,” he thought about it, “what if we hired a wedding planner? How soon were you thinking?”



“I’m not sure, maybe before I start showing. That would give us a couple of months.”



“Yes, it would,” he agreed.



“Nevaeh’s doing so much better since the doctor started her on Humira. I think this would be the perfect opportunity to take advantage of that; I’d like to have her in the wedding.”



“That’s a fantastic idea. What would you have her do? Be the flower girl?” he suggested.



“Yes, I was even looking online and found a beautiful flower girl dress that would look amazing on her.”



“Call around tomorrow, see what you can come up with and hire a wedding planner.”



The next morning, I searched wedding planners in the St. Louis area and began calling around. Most of them said that it wouldn’t be viable to plan a wedding in such short time. The more I called, the more discouraged I started to become. Just when I was about to give up, I saw one wedding planner who advertised short notice weddings. With an inkling of hope, I dialed the number and hoped for the best.



“No, that wouldn’t be a problem at all. We’ll have one of our planners organize and help you plan every detail of your wedding. We offer a wide variety of services, you just tell us what you need and we’ll see to it that it gets done.”



Those words were music to my ears. I hired them on the spot. Within a few days, a woman named Ann was knocking on the front door with a clipboard in hand, ready to plan my special day. The two of us sat at the kitchen table and poured over every single detail and idea that I had in mind. By the time Ann left, I was confident that my wedding was going to be something amazing.



A couple of months later, we tied the knot as Mr. and Mrs. Dale Halloway in our backyard. Under a white arched trellis elegantly decorated with white and red roses, we read our vows and said our ‘I Do’s’ on a warm early-summer afternoon. Lorraine was the maid of honor and Charlie was the best man. Most of Dale’s family flew in from San Diego, including his proud parents, as well as his grandmother. My entire family was also there. While I knew my dad wouldn’t be attending the wedding, I could feel him in spirit. Just as I met Dale in front of the podium that the ordained minister was standing behind, I caught a whiff of my dad’s scent—I knew he was smiling down at me.





Epilogue



“Slow down, Nevaeh!” I yelled as she zipped down the highway.



“Dad, I’m going so slow. Chill out!” she yelled back over the wind whipping through the car as her hair blew in front of her face.



“The speed limit is only 70 miles per hour, and you’re doing 75!”



Nevaeh looked down at the speedometer and saw that I was right. “Oh, sorry,” she smiled at me as she slowed down.



This was only her fifth driving lesson. She couldn’t believe that I was already letting her take the car out on the highway. She may have been a good driver, but she still needed to work on her parallel parking before she could take her driver’s test to get her license.



“Okay honey, let’s get off at the next exit so we can go pick up Dale and Alyssa from summer camp.”



Our first child together was a boy, Dale Jr. A few years later, Alyssa was born. Every year they went to summer camp, but this was the first year their big sister would be picking them up. Dale was now seven and Alyssa was four. Nevaeh was approaching her sweet sixteen, which Kimberly had secretly been planning a surprise party for.



“All right, now take a left turn where that sign is; the one that says, Camp Clarkson. After that left, you’ll go straight for quite a ways until I tell you to turn again.”



She turned on her left turn signal and began traveling down the road that led to the camp. The warm summer air whipped through the car, threatening to tangle every strand of hair on her head as they drove down the paved country road.