Cute, Joey. This story makes me love you all over again.
My parents were out of town that week, but I remember calling to tell them, “I’m going on a date with a customer that was in getting his brakes done. I met him yesterday.” I guess it’s unusual for a twenty-three-year-old to call her parents and tell them she’s going on a date, but it was normal for me. I was extremely close to my parents and I was just excited to tell them.
My parents and my little sister, Mary Kay, whom I call Mikey, asked me what this Chip guy looked like, and I said, “I honestly can’t tell you. He had a baseball cap on, and the way we were sitting, I didn’t really get a good look at him.”
When the night of our big date came, I was giddy and a bit anxious. I got ready at my sister’s apartment. She and her roommates, Sarah and Katiegh, were all there for moral support, and Chip was supposed to pick me up at six. Six rolls around. No Chip. Then six thirty—still no Chip. I thought, Well, maybe he thought the date was at seven, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt. But when seven came and went, I was officially done.
Finally, at seven thirty, a full ninety minutes late, he knocked at the door.
“Don’t even answer it,” I whispered to my friends. “I don’t want to go anywhere with this idiot.”
“But we want to see what he looks like!” they said, and so one of them finally opened the door while I hung back out of sight.
“Well, hello, ladies,” Chip said as he pushed his way into the apartment. I could tell that he charmed every one of them in about two seconds flat. I finally decided to step out and at least take a look at him. He was not like I remembered at all. This guy had no hair. I’d imagined he had hair under the baseball cap, but nope. Just stubble. And his face was weathered and flushed red, like he’d been working outside in the hot sun all day long. He was wearing a reddish-toned leather jacket, too, and I thought, Is this red guy even the same guy I was talking to at the shop?
It turned out that Chip had shaved his head to support a friend of his who was battling cancer.
A bunch of us shaved our heads for a good friend of mine. It was growing back, but it was just about a buzz cut at that point.
I still don’t remember what he said that convinced me to walk out the door with him. He didn’t even have a plan for our date. He said, “So, Joanna, where do you want to go eat?” He didn’t apologize for being late, either. He had so much confidence. I don’t know. I can’t explain it. Only Chip could be an hour and a half late and have no one mad about it.
I wasn’t an hour and a half late. She’s making that up. I was, like, twenty minutes late.
Chip was an hour and a half late to everything. If I’d known that then, maybe I wouldn’t have taken it personally.
Well, I think you’re wrong. You’re cute, though, and you do have me on the no-plans thing. That was bad. I don’t know why I’m like that. I just never have any plans. I like the way things just work themselves out. It’s more fun that way. I wasn’t nervous about the date or where to eat, and I wasn’t nervous about being late.
Out in his truck, Chip asked me again where I’d like to eat, so I suggested a place out in Valley Mills, a small town about thirty minutes from Waco—which, looking back, was a gutsy move for a first date. Thirty minutes was a long time to be in a car if you ran out of things to talk about. But there was a restaurant there in a historic mansion where my parents liked to go. It was really charming, and it was the first place that popped into my head.
The whole drive over there was kind of like a dream. Jo wasn’t anything like the girls I typically went out with. But she was so cute, you know? We wound up driving out of town through these back roads—I didn’t know where in the heck we were going—and we came up to this mansion with pillars on the front that looked like something you’d see in Gone with the Wind.
Everything was going about like I’d expected until we sat down at the table and the owner of the restaurant came over. Everywhere I went in Waco and Dallas, someone was always coming up and talking to me, so I thought maybe this guy was coming over to say hello. Turns out he wasn’t coming to talk to me at all. He was coming over to talk to Joanna.
“Hey, sweetheart, how are you? I saw your latest commercial. Tell your mom and dad I said hello, okay?” They talked for quite a while, and my mind started turning, like, Wow. This girl is a local superstar.
Dinner was perfect. We were both comfortable with each other for some reason, and the conversation came easy. When the bill came, Chip quickly popped up and took a big roll of cash out of his pocket. I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone carry that much cash. My dad was successful, but he kept his money in a bank. Seeing that, I thought, Oh, that’s why he stayed in Waco. He’s doing really well for himself!
You thought I was rich. Ha! What you didn’t know is that was probably all the money I had in the world. I always carried cash. I’d carry, like, $1,000 on me in those days. I just loved the way it felt. Plus, I worked with a lot of rough dudes, and some of them expected to be paid in cash.
It’s funny because I went to Baylor, where I was surrounded by all these rich kids from rich families, and for whatever reason I was never drawn to that. I was much more comfortable hanging out with the guys who dug ditches. I lived like them, too, whether it was carrying all my money around in my pocket or sitting under some shady tree at lunchtime while they laughed at me trying to eat jalape?os.
After dinner the two of us went and sat on that grand front porch for a while. It was a beautiful night, and I could have just sat there and listened to the silence. But Chip, of course—he had other ideas. I just looked at him until I couldn’t even hear him anymore. I remember thinking, Nope. This guy isn’t even close to done.
In my head, I started to go down the checklist we women put together in our heads and our hearts. I’d always been attracted to people with dark hair. He was blond or redheaded or something in between—it was too short to tell. I would have preferred hair, period.
I’d always been attracted to quiet guys, too, which I knew was a problem because the quiet guys never had the nerve to ask me out, and they certainly never drew me out the way this guy did. Still, he was all over the place. He was talking about the businesses he’d started, and these ideas he had, and how he was buying up little houses and flipping them and renting some out to Baylor students, and I was wondering if he was just a bit crazy.
I liked stability. I liked safety. I liked traditional and I liked being on time. And this Chip with the beet-red face wasn’t any of those things. I did think he was kind of fascinating, though.
I know this is going to sound strange to some people, but right in the middle of that—right in the middle of me trying to figure this guy out—a little voice in my head said, That’s the man you’re going to marry. I swear to you it was clear as day. It seemed like the voice of God, or maybe it was some deep intuition, but I heard it. In fact, I heard it so loudly that I completely tuned out our conversation and lost focus.