I Will Always Love You

"It doesn't take any talent at all to get married," my sister-in-law laughed, "anybody can do that, especially if they lower their standards far enough. The trick is finding the right person to marry."

I loved Becky!  She was new to our family, and young, but she had great wisdom and I really valued her opinion. 

"I wish finding the right one was all it took for me," I sighed.  It was still only a few weeks since Garth and I had said goodbye.  Every time I heard a car drive past my house I still looked up, hoping against hope that he was coming to tell me that his ex-wife had changed her mind again, and decided she wasn't ready to give up her wild ways so they weren't going to re-marry after all.

"You know," Becky suggested carefully, "a friend of mine once told me you can love quite a few people in this life, but maybe not be destined to marry them."

That was a new thought to me.  I had loved Gene, or at least I thought I had. I had surely loved Sheldon, and now I loved Garth.  I couldn't be married to any of them, but that didn't mean I didn't love them.  Somehow that realization made me feel better. 

I didn't like the saying, 'It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,”  at least, not  now while the pain of saying goodbye was so stark.  Perhaps someday I'd be able to look back fondly on these wonderful men and remember the happiness they had each given me.  At the moment, though, my heart was still crying.

The day my little sister Julie got married, mom had said something that also made me think.  "You know, Gale," she had said, "I was thinking about all the young men killed during World War II.  I wonder if one of them wasn't up in heaven singing Halleluiah the day you and Sheldon got divorced, and he's there waiting for you now."

That was a really interesting idea, but I hoped I didn't have to wait until I got to heaven before I found Mr. Right.  To tell you the truth, I wasn't at all interested in looking any more.  Garth still held my heart, and though I knew it was wrong of me to hope, I was still waiting for him to come back.

Just before school let out I got a notice from my mortgage company, telling me they were repossessing our house.  It had been a whole year since Sheldon left and the mortgage hadn't been paid, so it wasn't a surprise.  I even had a plan in place for when it happened.  My little brother, Phillip, was being transferred down to Thatcher, Arizona, and we had made arrangements for me to take over his house payments and move into his house in Mesa.  I was sad to be leaving our friends and neighborhood, but his house was close to mom and dad's, which would be nice.  The only real problem with moving was knowing that Garth wouldn't know where to find me.  I couldn't just call him up on the phone and say, "Hey, Garth, I'm moving back into Mesa and here's my address, so in case your ex-wife changes her mind and doesn't want you to re-marry her, or in case she blows it again sometime in the future and breaks up your marriage, you'll know where to find me."  I mean, I would have liked to give him my address, but how 'other womanish' would that be? 

We moved into our new house in June.  It was fun painting and decorating and making it our home.  It was more fun staying home with my kids and not having to teach school.  I had a couple of phone calls from men I'd met before Garth, but I always ended up talking about him all through the dates, so they didn't asked me out again.  I suppose I was a lost cause.

Moving meant I wasn't in Garth's sister-in-law's ward anymore, but we still called each other on the phone and I made sure she knew where we lived.  I tried not to ask her how Garth was doing every time we talked, but at the first of August she told me on her own. 


Neither she, nor any of Garth's family, were happy that he was re-marrying his ex-wife.  They were sure he was just asking for more pro-longed heart ache, even though they knew, like Garth, that it was the best thing to do for the sake of his children.  Still, they all hoped the marriage wouldn't actually go through.  Garth put it off for months, waiting for his ex-wife to either change her mind or prove she was actually determined to make their marriage work.  The first of August his sister-in-law called to let me know that they were actually getting married.  It was the same week as my birthday, and really hard to take, but at least I knew. Finally, perhaps, my heart would stop beating faster every time the phone rang.  Still, even though I knew I had to stop asking how he was doing or hoping I would see him driving down the street, I knew a part of me would always love Garth, and that in the back of my mind I would always be waiting for him to show up on my doorstep.