I slid it out, and my knees near gave, because it was a certified copy of a marriage certificate, raised seal and all, and the filing date stamped on it was the eleventh of March of this year.
We were married in 1991.
It took me two days and a trip to the probate court in Van Wert to understand what I was holding, and when I did I had to go sit in my truck in the parking lot a while.
The preacher who married us was an old man named Vestal Cline who did the ceremony in his front room because the church basement had flooded that week. He signed the license. Nadine signed it. I signed it. And then he folded it into his coat pocket and never turned it in, and he died in 1996, and for thirty-four years my wife and I were not married in the eyes of the state of Ohio.
She found out in 2023. There was some business with a refinance and the title company wanted a copy of our certificate and nobody could produce one, and she told me it was a mix-up and she’d handle it, and I said fine and did not think about it again for one single minute.
What she did was file a delayed registration of marriage, which is a real thing and a miserable one.
She needed affidavits. She got two — Delores Kepler, who stood up with her in that front room, and my cousin Ray, who was nineteen that day and does not remember one bit of it but was willing to swear to what he’d been told. She had to dig the county’s copy of the license application out of a box in a basement, unreturned, sitting right where it had sat since Reagan. She had to write out a statement in her own words. And there’s a hearing on the paperwork, and she sat through that hearing by herself on a Tuesday in March and told me she’d been at the eye doctor.
Her note was down in the bottom of that pot, folded to the size of a stamp.
Don’t be mad. If I’d told you, you’d have got that look on you and made it about a preacher who’s been dead thirty years. It’s fixed, it’s filed, and it’s dated back to 1991 where it always belonged. If anything ever happens to me you carry this to the Social Security office and they cannot tell you no. That’s the gift. It was never going to be a trolling motor. — N.
If anything ever happens to me.
A month later I woke up beside her in the dark and she was already gone, and I have thought a great deal since about the word survivor and how close I came to not being one on paper.
I carried that certificate into the Social Security office in October in a folder with my hands shaking. The young woman behind the glass looked at the seal and the delayed registration, typed a while, and said everything was in order.
Everything was in order. Because my wife spent five months making it so, and then stood in our kitchen and let me say real practical, hon, in that voice, and watched me shove it to the back of the pantry.
She never brought it up. Not one word, not one hint, not so much as a look.
The percolator sits out on the counter now where the good dishes used to be. It’s dented and it cost ten dollars and I could not tell you today what a trolling motor even costs.