Happy, Happy, Happy (12 page)

One rainy night, Kay came home late from work, and I accused her of running around on me, which I knew she would never do. It was a life-changing event for Kay, and she remembers the details and aftermath of the incident better than I do:

I
think Phil’s problems really started during our first year at Louisiana Tech. He was playing football but had a wife and baby at home. It was a lot of grown-up responsibility for an eighteen-year-old, and he really wasn’t ready for it. He saw his teammates going out and partying all the time, and he wanted to go out, too. I think that’s why he so easily got in with the wrong group—he wanted to be like the single guys who had all the freedom. He’d never really experienced the single life
since we married so young. I tried to do the party scene with him, but I couldn’t leave Alan, who was only a baby. I didn’t think it was right. I didn’t like drunkenness. I didn’t think it was wrong to have a drink, but I just didn’t like the whole scene.

I really thought that after Phil graduated from Louisiana Tech and we moved to Junction City, Arkansas, he would settle down. After all, he was going to be a coach and teacher, which came with a lot of responsibility. But Al Bolen, the man who hired him, was as big a party guy as Phil, so the partying and running around only continued.

When Phil leased the bar, people couldn’t believe that I went out and stayed with him. I worked as a barmaid, and the people there really respected me and told everybody, “Don’t you talk ugly to her. She doesn’t drink and she’s a nice lady.” It surprised me that those people were so protective of me. They always asked me why I was in the bar if I didn’t drink, but when I decided to stay with Phil and remain faithful to him, I felt it was my duty to protect him. With me at the bar, I felt he wouldn’t get in as much trouble as he would if I wasn’t there.

The year after the bar fight was probably the worst time of my life. Phil was working offshore and drinking more than he ever had before. When I came home one night, he accused me of having an affair, which was so stupid. I had never done anything like that, and it wasn’t because his friends weren’t hitting on me, either. It was because I wasn’t that kind of person. I always told him, “If I leave you, I’ll divorce you and find somebody else if I want to. I would never cheat on you.”

I’ve always considered myself a good person. I don’t know if it’s my personality or what, but I’ve always been a very serving person. During all of Phil’s troubles, I felt like I was operating on my grandmother’s faith and what she instilled in me. I finally realized you have to have your own faith. Phil was cursing me and calling me every ugly word under the sun. It was the first time in my life that I felt hopeless. When I was younger, I read that a person can live so long without water, so long without food, but that you can never live without hope. I have always believed that hope and dreams are what keep us going. My entire life, all I had ever wanted was to be the best wife and mother I could. I didn’t want riches or fame; I wanted to have a loving, good, and safe home for my boys—that’s all.

“When I came home one night, he accused me of having an affair, which was so stupid.”

The night Phil accused me of having an affair, I hit rock bottom. I went to the bathroom and cried. It was the first time in my life that I didn’t know how to fix the problem. It’s the only time in my life that I had suicidal thoughts. I just wanted to go to sleep and not wake up because I didn’t know how to fix our lives and didn’t know what to do. Would I have gone through with it? I hope not, but I really wanted Phil to suffer because of what he was doing to me.

But as I sat there contemplating what to do, I heard my little boys’ house shoes running down the hall. Alan was nine, Jason was five, and Willie was three. Alan knocked on the bathroom door and said, “Mama,
don’t be sad. Don’t be crying.” I’ll never forget what he said next: “God’s going to take care of us. You’ll be all right. We’ll be all right. Daddy will quit drinking one day.” It was like a light went off in my head. I thought, “Oh, my goodness, what am I thinking? I’ve got three little boys. Am I going to leave them behind to live with a drunk?” Phil couldn’t have taken care of the boys in his condition.

I prayed to God and asked Him to help me find some kind of peace. Obviously, my life wasn’t going right, but I knew I had to take care of my three boys. The next day, I was watching a TV show called
Let the Bible Speak,
and there was Bill Smith, the preacher Jan brought up to the beer joint. The things he was saying were what I needed to hear—what I wanted in my life. He was speaking about how to obtain peace and hope. So I called the number on the screen and set up an appointment to meet him the next day. Somebody kept the kids for me, and I went over to White’s Ferry Road Church.

One of the first things Bill Smith asked me was, “If you die, do you think you’ll go to heaven?” I told him, “I sure do. Let me tell you what I’ve been living with.” I went into how bad Phil was and how I’d still been a faithful and loving wife to him. Smith asked me if I thought I’d earned my way to heaven, and I told him that I certainly had. Smith asked me if I had peace and hope in my life, and I told him, “Now, that’s the problem.” There was some sort of disconnect because I felt I had earned my way to God, but I didn’t have any hope and didn’t feel any peace.

Smith shared the gospel with me, and I became convinced that I
couldn’t be saved on my own good works. I was a good person, but I was a good person without Jesus Christ in my life. That’s not enough. Smith told me that if I wanted to, I could leave the church that day with Jesus Christ in my life. I confessed to Jesus and made him the Lord of my life and was baptized. The best thing Smith told me that day was that when I went home, Phil would still be as drunk as ever and would still act terrible. But Smith told me I would be different because I would have God’s spirit living in me. He told me that when things were bad here on Earth, I just had to think about my next life in heaven and how wonderful it would be. I left his office as a Christian and started developing my own faith.

I went home and tolerated Phil’s behavior because I knew God would help me through it. I was working in the offices at Howard Brothers Discount Stores in West Monroe, and Phil wasn’t doing much of anything besides drinking and staying out all night. I came home from work late one night, and Phil started in on me about running around on him again. He looked at me and said, “I’m sick of you. It was bad enough that I had to live with you before, but now you’re a holy roller.” He also called me a Bible thumper and a goody two-shoes. “You think you’re an angel,” he said. “I want you to get out and take the three boys with you. I want y’all to leave.” He knew he couldn’t separate me from my sons.

I asked Phil, “Are we messing up your bachelor’s life?” He told me yes, and I knew there was nothing else to do but leave. Our little boys were so sad and had tears streaming down their faces. They didn’t want their daddy drunk, but they loved their father. We stayed with Phil’s
brother Harold for one night. He told us we could only stay one night because he was afraid of what Phil would do. I never held that against Harold because I didn’t know what Phil would do either.

The boys and I moved into a low-rent apartment, and White’s Ferry Road Church helped me pay the rent and get some furniture. We were apart from Phil for about three months; I was really hiding from him. I put everything in my maiden name, thinking he wouldn’t be able to find us. I went to lunch every day with one of my girlfriends at work, and one day when we came back to the office, we saw Phil’s old, gray truck in the parking lot. Phil’s head was lying on the steering wheel, so I figured he’d driven there, then passed out drunk. I told my friend to go on into the office and watch out the window and if she saw Phil flashing a gun to call the police. “You can’t go out there by yourself,” she told me. “Let’s go in and call the police.” But I didn’t want Phil following me into my office and hurting anybody, so I told her to watch out the window and call the police if anything bad happened.

I walked up to Phil’s truck and opened the door. His face rose up, and there were big tears streaming down his face. I had never seen him cry. The macho man never cried. He looked at me and said, “I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I can’t do anything. I want my family back.” He told me he wouldn’t drink anymore and was done with partying. Of course, I’d heard that many times before. I felt God’s courage inside me and told him, “Phil, you can’t do it by yourself, buddy. You just can’t.” Phil told me he needed help and then asked me where he could find it.

“There’s only one person who can help you,” I told him.

“God?” Phil asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“I don’t know how to find Him,” Phil replied.

“I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I can’t do anything. I want my family back.”

As a boy, Phil had gone to church and Sunday school, but he had been away from God for a long time. I told Phil I knew someone he could talk to and to be back at my office at five thirty, when I got off work. I told him I’d lead him to my apartment. When I went back upstairs to my office, I was so happy I sailed up three steps at a time. I called Bill Smith, the preacher, and told him to be at my apartment at five forty-five. He said, “Well, let me check my calendar.”

“What is more important than one lost soul coming back to the Lord?” I asked him. “If you have anything else, you have to cancel it.”

“You know what?” Smith told me. “Nothing is more important than that.”

Smith and his wife, Margaret, met Phil and me at my apartment. The first thing Phil told him was: “I don’t trust you.” Smith told Phil that he could understand why he didn’t trust him. “Considering the people you’ve been running around with, I wouldn’t trust anyone either,” Smith told him. Then Smith held up his Bible and said, “Do you trust this?”

“Yeah, I trust that book, but I’m going to check out everything you say,” Phil said. “I don’t take any man’s word for anything.”

I went into the back room with the boys and Margaret, and Phil and Smith studied the Bible together for several hours. When they were finished, Phil told Smith he was going to check out everything they’d talked about, and they scheduled another meeting for the next night. We let Phil move into our apartment, and the first thing the boys asked him to do was bring back our big TV. The next day, the boys and I left to go to the grocery store. When we returned home, I found a note from Phil, telling us to come to White’s Ferry Road Church. When I walked into the back door of the church, Phil was already in the baptistry. He’s so impatient, he couldn’t wait for me to get there! Smith had taken Phil’s confession and was in the process of baptizing him. I looked down at our boys and they were crying. Alan looked at me and said, “I guess that devil is going to be gone now.” Phil was twenty-eight years old, and our lives were starting over.