Page 110 of Wild Abandon

I’m not proud of what I did.

I took that money to the airport and bought a one-way ticket to San Francisco. It took two layovers to get there, but I made it. And it was cold.

I was twenty years old, and the homeless population was out of control. There wasn’t room at a shelter for me, and there certainly wasn’t a safe place for me to crash. I took a job at the first Help Wanted sign I saw—a diner. I washed dishes.

Soon after, I had another job at a construction site. I always made sure I was working and had money in my pocket because living on the streets of San Francisco was not an option. I rented a room for cheap, and within a month, I was working at a bar, stocking shelves and wiping down tables, where I made my first friends in over a year.

The guys were my age, college kids. While I worked, they would go to school, and at night, we’d party. Well, they’d party. I’d work. I wasn’t like the other guys. I was always trying to keep my head above water, looking for a paycheck and a roof over my head.

One day, they asked if I wanted to go to a festival. I said no at first, but I hadn’t done anything normal in…well, ever. So, I went.

And you know how that went.

Ellie Martin was a spitfire. I couldn’t keep up with her. For a guy who was always trying to grab at the next straw, she was free and light and a breath of fresh air. I wanted to be her. So, I tried for a day.

“You’re tall,” she said, looking up at me from her tiny five-foot-two frame. Dark eyes, big and shining from the natural high she was on.

“You’re short,” I countered.

“Kiss me,” she dared.

So, I did.

I did everything that girl told me to do that day.

That included marrying her.

The festival lasted three days, and when I showed up for work at the bar, it was with a smile on my face and a wife on my arm. I was worried that, now that we were back in the real world, she would start panicking. But she didn’t. She was happy. She sat at the bar and drank while I worked. She asked me a million questions. I answered every single one of them, not used to talking about myself.

Sure, it was weird. I’d married a girl who hadn’t even known my last name until we’d signed the marriage certificate, but I didn’t care. For the first time in my life, I’d met someone I just wanted to be around. She put a smile on my face and made me feel like the twenty-year-old I really was.

Someone in the bar congratulated us and then asked where our rings were. I never had a girlfriend, let alone a wife. My first day as a husband, and I couldn’t even buy her a ring.

Ellie didn’t care. She asked me how much money I had in my pocket.

Twenty-five bucks.

She had forty.

“It’s enough,” she said.

“For what?” I asked.

“To promise forever to each other.”

When the bar closed, we ran down the street to a tattoo parlor on the corner. We asked the shop owner what we could get with our money, and he laughed at us. Ellie wanted matching flowers. I hated that idea. If we were promising forever, then we needed something that meant forever.

We walked out with matching infinity symbols. Just the outline. That was all we needed.

Hand in hand, heart-to-heart, I kissed my bride on a street corner in San Francisco. I might not have found my dad like I’d planned, but I felt like I had found something better.

Ellie.

It was the next day when I met Ed and Rosemary Martin. I was petrified at what Ellie’s parents would think of our marriage. Hell, we weren’t legal to drink, yet someone had deemed us legal to wed. We were young, dumb, and in love.

When we pulled up to Russet Ranch, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The grapes were green and lush, at full capacity for harvesting. I didn’t know anything about wine then, but I knew it was harvest season. There were workers all about, heading into trucks after an evening of harvesting. Other men were carrying gray baskets over their heads to a large machine where a robust man with a full black beard was raking the grapes through, de-stemming them for the crush. There was so much going on that no one noticed we’d arrived.

Ellie took my hand, and together, we got our hands dirty. It was the coolest thing I’d ever done.