That’s when I started laughing so hard it hurt, because I had just given birth and everything hurt.
Beau’s full name is Beau Vernon Oakes.
He has hated that middle name his entire life. He got teased about it all through school in Etowah County. Kids called him “Vern” just to make him mad. He asked his mama once why on earth she’d named him Vernon, and she just smiled and said, “After somebody who helped me a long time ago.” He always figured it was some old uncle. He never pushed it, because his mama got teary every time it came up.
He’d been named after a twenty-four-year-old Waffle House cook who’d held his mama’s hand on a diner floor. And now that same woman, thirty-one years later, had just done the exact same thing for his son.
Beau put his face in his hands. When he looked up, he was crying harder than I’d ever seen him cry, harder than at our wedding, harder than when his daddy passed. He reached out and took Verna’s hand.
