Wright Love Wrong Time

By Laurie Guzman

“God, please,” I prayed. “Don’t let me fail my sons.” I wasn’t asking for happiness. I was asking for stability. For something steady. For someone steady. And then, somewhere between exhaustion and loneliness, the Tinder Dating app happened. A girlfriend called me one night and said, “No baseball practices, no baseball games I hear, so get your ass over to my house and have a glass of wine with me. Let the kids do homework, come over for a few hours and be back home by 8. I have something I want to show you.”

Off to Amy’s I went. Before I knew it, I was on Tinder, profile live and we were laughing at the profiles of some real creatures that popped up as a match for me. I told myself I wasn’t really looking. I was just distracting myself from the ache. That’s when Barry appeared.

Not flashy. Not polished. No staged gym selfies. Just kind eyes and a smile that looked like it knew how to forgive things. A tender soul, a tender energy to be with. He was from Alabama. He said “yes ma’am” without irony. He laughed easily, but not loudly. His voice carried calm — the kind that lowers your blood pressure without you realizing it. Our first conversations were unguarded in a way that surprised me. He listened. Not the “Is this going to be a long story Laurie talk” or kind of listening. The kind where you could hear him breathing on the other end of the phone because he didn’t want to miss a word. He asked about my boys — not as small talk, but as if their hearts mattered.

“What’s Benjamin like?” “And Evan? What makes him light up?”

“How are you handling things really Laurie?” No one had asked me that in a long time, more importantly no one let me cry and share in a way that allowed me to feel heard, to not be dismissed with, “Let it go Laurie, you got this, you and the boys are better off without Ben.”

Unless you have walked in my shoes, walked in the shoes of a single parent raising 2 lives without family to lean on, without money to properly provide, your best friend, your brother just died, what I really needed was someone to just listen, be patient, someone to just hold space for me to allow me to be scared, to grieve without judgement, to be present!

Barry and I started talking every night. The 1.5 hours between Alabama and Tennessee felt smaller in the dark. I would sit on the edge of my bed, lights off, house quiet, and let his voice steady me. He had this way of saying my name — “Laur-ie” — drawing it out softly, like it was something fragile. He told me about his son. About mistakes he wished he could undo. About the kind of man he was still trying to become. There was humility in him. A man who had been broken open and hadn’t hardened because of it. I barely remembered to breathe most days, let alone relax but with Barry he was my exhale at night.

One evening on the baseball bleachers, watching Benjamin’s game, when my phone lit up and I smiled without meaning to, my friend Angie caught me.

“Who is that?”

“Nobody,” I said with a big chin on my face. Like a little girl with a secret. But it was already something. Angie demanded his last name — because of course we had made that ridiculous drunken pact about never marrying into a terrible last name again — I realized I didn’t know it. After weeks of talking. After sharing childhood wounds and grown-up regrets. After laughing until midnight. I never asked his last name, which also demonstrates how well I vetted guys at this time. NOT! I just got lucky.

“What’s your last name?” I texted. He replied, “Guess what it is.”. I laughed and then was nervous, what the hell is it going to be that he is hesitating to tell me.

I stared at the screen and typed, “ Pickle”. Then came, “Barry Wright”. I screamed, “You got to be freakin’ kidding me!” Showed Angie my phone and we laughed so loud the other baseball parents were asking, “ What the heck are you two up to now!” I couldn’t believe it.

Amy was right, Tinder helped me meet my Mr. Wright.

Barry drove up to see me for the first time with flowers that looked like they’d been chosen by a man who stood in the aisle far too long wanting to get it right. He fixed small things without announcing it — a loose cabinet hinge, a wobbly chair. He folded himself into our chaos without trying to control it. He would say, “I’ve got you,” and Baby, like he was talking to a fragile child in that low Southern drawl. And for the first time in my life, I believed someone did. We commuted back and forth for two and a half years. Highway miles, gas station coffee, long goodbyes in parking lots. Loving someone across some distance with children keeping our schedules limited requires optimism. It requires believing there will be more time.

There is always the assumption of more time.

Looking back, I can see how carefully he loved. As if he knew love was something you didn’t grip too tightly. As if he understood it could disappear. But in those years, he was warm in the coldest season of my life. Proof that I had not missed my chance at tenderness. Proof that even broken people can recognize each other and try. Oh, he tried. And even after we broke — because distance is heavy and baggage doesn’t unpack itself — love did not fully leave the room. Some loves never do.

We tried. God, how he tried to always make me happy. But, the distance, the lack of commitment, he was not in position to move to TN and I was not in a position to move to Alabama. I couldn’t handle the distance so we ended our love affair and stayed friends.

In 2018, cancer did what distance never could. It brought me back to his doorstep — but this time there was no long highway ahead of us, no next weekend to plan. Barry texted, “Come visit”, I knew. Some part of me knew this was the last time I would hear him say my name the way he did — “Laur-ie” — like it was something to be handled gently. His house was quieter than I remembered. Not peaceful. Just thin.

Hospice had placed a hospital bed in the living room near the window. The light coming in felt too bright for what was happening inside that room. Barry had always been broad-shouldered, steady. That day he looked so much smaller. Not just physically — though the cancer had hollowed him — but smaller in the way a strong tree looks once lightning has struck it. Still standing. But altered.

He smiled when he saw me.

“There’s my girl,” he said, voice rough but still carrying that Alabama softness. I sat beside him and took his hand. It felt lighter than I remembered. I had held that hand in parking lots, across restaurant tables, laced between mine on long walks. This time, I held it knowing I would soon have to let it go forever. We didn’t rush to fill the silence. We had never needed to.

After a while he looked at me in the way he used to when he was about to say something honest — something that cost him. “You were always my heart,” he said. “My true love.”

There it was. Not dramatic. Not theatrical. Just a fact. I swallowed hard because there are words you wait your whole life to hear — and sometimes they arrive when there is no future left to place them in. Then he added,“It’s a good thing we didn’t stay together right Laurie?” he continued, glancing toward the table filled with medications. “You’d have to be dealing with this, Laurie. You would have to take care of me.” I wanted to protest. To tell him he never would have been a burden. That loving someone at the end is still loving them. But I understood what he was really saying.

All I could do was weep. I crawled to the floor next to his side as he laid on the couch and rested my head one last time on his chest. He did not want my last memory of him to be this. And I didn’t know which truth hurt more — that neither of us had ever fully let go of the other... or that he thought I should feel relieved I wasn’t the one watching him slip away day by day.

“You loved me so well Mr. Wright,” I whispered.

His heartbeat was slower now. Thinner. But it was still there. “You’re safe,” he murmured. “Rest. No worries tonight. I’m here.” Even then. Even like that. He was still trying to steady me.

We talked about our children — because that was who we were. Parents first. Always. He spoke about his son with the same fierce devotion that had made me love him in the first place. He asked about Benjamin and Evan as he always did with care and interest. He nodded, satisfied, like that mattered more than anything else when I shared they were doing really well. Before I left, I stood at the door longer than necessary. Neither of us said “goodbye.” We both knew what it meant, and neither of us could quite for it. “I’ll see you,” he said instead. And I answered, “I know.” He passed not long after.

Sometimes, late at night, when the house is quiet and the world feels heavy again, I can still hear him. “Lie your head on my chest, Laurie.” And for a moment, I do. This love story did not end the way I once imagined. There was no wedding, no shared address, no growing old side by side. But it was real. It was tender. It was proof that even in the wreckage of divorce, grief, and single motherhood, God still sends someone to remind you that you are worthy of being held gently. Barry was my exhale in a season when I could barely breathe.

And even now — especially knowing how it ends — I would not trade the love we had for anything.