“My mother tapped me on the shoulder and told me, ‘You’re coming with us,’” Mary said. Her parents refused to let her even leave the house for two weeks.
Finally, with Mary’s mother backing her up, her father relented and let her join Charles — but not before he virtually disowned her.
Three months later, Charles was drafted into the Army, and Mary wanted to live with her parents.
“I told my Dad that Charles left for the service,” Mary said. “He told me, ‘What do you want me to do about it?’” Heartbroken, she moved back with Charles’s parents.
But even two years of military separation couldn’t dull the love between Charles and Mary.
Charles reached for his wallet, but Mary quickly snatched out of his hands. “Don’t you dare show that,” she snapped.
So he instead described what he carried in every wallet he has owned for the last 65 years.
“When I was stationed in Japan, Mary sent me a letter. Inside that letter was a picture of the most gorgeous girl you’ll ever see, wearing a bathing suit,” he said, with a wink. “I’ve carried that picture around with me all these years.”
Years went by and the breach between Mary and her father slowly healed, thanks to the love of her mother.
“She backed me up so much,” Mary said.
Charles was also hurt, but never lost respect for his father-in-law.
(Story continues below)
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“I never had anything against him,” he said. “And I always got along with her brothers.”
When they had been married 25 years, Mary’s mother died, and her father was in failing health. She did what a daughter does. She took him into her home.
“He didn’t have any place to go,” she said.
Her father lived for six months, but asked Mary to promise him one thing — that she and Charles would have their marriage blessed in the Catholic Church.
She made that promise just before he died, but had no idea how to fulfill it. Charles wasn’t Catholic, and Mary had stopped practicing her Catholic faith when they were married in a civil ceremony.
Forty-one more years passed, and Mary couldn’t forget.