And I turn into the guy with the girl everybody wants to know.
—BLAKE SHELTON, “A Guy with a Girl”
She was a little tipsy, and I was a lot late.
My first date with Terresa almost didn’t happen. I got lost on the way to Joe’s Crab Shack, and it was a while before I realized I had been driving in the opposite direction on the 635. We decided to meet at Joe’s, a cheesy family-style seafood chain, because it was halfway between Dallas, where I lived, and Fort Worth, near where she lived with her parents. I was horrified that the poor girl might think she was being stood up—that’s not how I was raised—so I pulled over to a pay phone to call the restaurant and beg whoever picked up the phone at the bar to let her know. By then Terresa had already been sitting at the table for almost an hour. The waiter took pity on her and kept sending over drinks compliments of the house. I guess it took the sting out of the humiliation because, by the time I finally arrived full of apologies, she greeted me with a dazzling smile.
It was a blind date arranged by a mutual friend. Well, blind in a one-sided sort of way. It was 1997 and I’d already been working at K-Plex Radio, The Wolf’s precursor, for several months, so I was already a familiar name and voice on the Dallas–Fort Worth scene. Terresa already knew about me because I used to talk about my life on the radio. We had met a couple of times before in passing, but my memory of those encounters is hazy. I was working a live concert event in the parking lot of a local Walmart attended by Terresa and her four-year-old daughter, Lauren, and we exchanged brief hellos, or so she reminded me. A few of the DJs were there to meet and greet fans and listeners. Another time, Terresa was among a handful of people who’d won a birthday lunch with listeners, but we sat on opposite ends of the table. Again, she had to remind me of that fact.
Terresa was a huge country music fan and an avid listener of the local country radio stations, especially mine. She was always calling in to win prizes for the various contests we had, attending events on concerts we hosted whenever she could. The girl also had hustle. She was doing some work for the Fort Worth Fire hockey team and approached Chris Sommer, our morning news guy, to see if we could do ticket giveaways to the games. The two bantered back and forth, starting up a friendly little email correspondence.
“That Cody is such a cutie,” she told him.
“Well, he’s single,” Chris wrote back, then decided to play Cupid by telling me about my admirer.
Early the following Saturday morning, Terresa was taking a computer class and I happened to be on the radio. She called in to make a song request, we got to chatting off air, and I finally made the connection.
“Is this the Terresa I saw the other night with the little girl?” I asked her.
“Yes, that’s me! Well, you don’t know me yet, but I sure do remember you!” she said.
I got up the nerve to ask her for her number. Because she was living at her family home, she didn’t want to give it to me in case one of her protective parents answered the phone, so, in the days before cell phones were commonplace, she gave me her pager number. Yes, her pager! Google it—it was quite a device. We had a few more phone conversations before I finally got up the nerve to ask her on a date. I knew nothing about her, other than that she was a sweet, wholesome, age-appropriate girl who happened to be a single mom to a little girl. But here’s what I learned about her by the time we closed down the crab shack:
Terresa is petite. At just 5’2” she’s the perfect Texan doll in her jeans and cowboy boots. In fact, she was the kind of girl all the boys in high school would have fallen for, but who I’d never have imagined would look at me twice. And yet here she was, laser focused on yours truly with those high-beamed blue eyes of hers. I was beyond flattered, and I must admit that I was already beginning to fall in love with how we looked together as a couple. In high school I was no jock, nor did I have the height and sculpted body of the football-playing types all the girls went for. But Terresa’s femininity made me feel like a manly man.
She was also bubbly, fearless, and fun to be around. Even though the thought of sexual attention from anyone, male or female, terrified me, something about this small-town country girl’s sense of humor and flirtatiousness put me right at ease. She also seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say. Her undivided attention made me feel like that guy in the beer ad, “the most interesting man in the world.” You can tell a lot about someone’s potential compatibility in a relationship by how intently they listen.
A down-home Texas girl who came from an old ranching family in San Angelo, Texas, Terresa had a sense of adventure. She could ride horses, shoot a gun, drive a tractor, and hold her own on a mechanical bull. She was not afraid to get her hands dirty, and she was most comfortable in scuffed-up boots and faded jeans. But she could also dance, do up her hair and makeup like a beauty queen, and turn heads. Terresa had married her college sweetheart, Lauren’s father, and moved to Houston, but when the relationship fell apart, she returned home, taking jobs from waitressing to admin to support herself and her child because, “I’ve been working since I was fourteen years old and I want to get back on my own two feet.”
Aside from her first husband, Terresa had never dated. At twenty-four, less than a year older than I was, she obviously had some sexual experience whereas I, of course, had none, zero, zilch. She also came from a religious family, Southern Baptists like mine, but even bigger churchgoers than my mom, because they attended services on most weeknights. Her parents were salt-of-the-earth types who rode horses to school when they were kids. They met in the fifth grade and have been together ever since. They doted on Terresa and accepted anyone who Terresa loved as one of their own, as long she was happy.
It was immediately obvious to me that Terresa had a nurturing soul. She knew how to listen with her whole being. Until then, I’d always felt like I was the listener, the person in the room who could draw someone out of their shell with my charm. But Terresa got me to share things about myself I’d never told anyone else—everything except that I liked men, which I wasn’t even telling myself at this point. With her, I became the talker. And it stemmed from the fact that I knew she genuinely wanted to know every detail she could about me. For the first time, as I stood on the other side of the conversation, I understood viscerally the power that a great listener has to seduce!
That night at Joe’s we talked nonstop for a good four hours, delving into our stories and what made us tick until they had to throw us out of there. I ordered a Blue Moon beer and pretended to nurse it because, although I was a Mormon and didn’t drink, I wanted Terresa to feel comfortable enough to sip another margarita and keep the conversation going. The connection felt so natural and comfortable, it was almost as if we were old friends from a past life, and I didn’t want the evening to end. The restaurant was one of those places where you could write on the table. They even provided you with a marker. That night we wrote our names down among all the other couples’ names and love hearts, and as far as I know they are still there. Even then I kinda knew I’d met my future wife.
We were more or less inseparable from that moment on. I took Terresa to concerts and work parties all over the metroplex, and it was as much fun driving down the highway in my two-door Ford Explorer, laughing, talking, and making plans for our future as it was hanging out with the country stars and fans once we got to our destination. On weekends and evenings, I would hang out with her at the family homestead where Terresa, her folks, and I drank beers to wash down some Tex-Mex, while neighbors, cousins, uncles, and aunts stopped by to tell jokes and gossip. I loved that warm hug of acceptance.
But at one point I started to feel overwhelmed. It was all happening so fast. I was falling hard not just for Terresa, but Lauren, and before I thought I was ready to wrap my head around it, I was already taking on a fatherly role to a little girl who’d only been in my life for a short time. It was almost frightening how protective I felt for her, but was I even qualified? I’d only recently lost my virginity to Terresa and now this. Whoa! I thought. What am I getting myself into?
If I was going to be a stepdad and have an instant family, I wanted to be sure I was all in. I pumped the breaks and told Terresa I needed a monthlong pause before taking the relationship any further. Retreating into my own space is something I’ve always done when I felt some kind of turmoil. I need to be still and turn inward to hear my own voice. Of course, Terresa was sweet and understanding about it, as she always was. She appreciated the fact that I didn’t want to have any doubts about our future together and risk breaking two hearts. Or three, if I count my own.
A week or so before our “time-out,” we attended a Gary Allan concert together. We were both huge fans, and Terresa was starstruck when we went backstage. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I noticed Gary was being especially attentive to Terresa.
Fresh off his debut gold album, Used Heart for Sale, as well as his first marriage, Gary was doing multiple performances in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. So, when the opportunity came up two weeks later to attend another concert at Billy Bob’s, the world’s largest honky-tonk, Terresa decided to take advantage of her temporary single status to go out and have herself some fun with one of her girlfriends. She found herself sitting in the front row, where Gary recognized her, grabbed her camera, and took a pre-selfie selfie. He flirted with her through the rest of the performance. As Terresa was leaving, one of Gary’s managers pulled her aside.
“Gary wants to meet you,” he told her.
“But I already met him,” she said.
“He wants you to stay.”
“Sorry, I’ve got to get home to my daughter.”
“Can he at least have your number?”
“Sorry, I don’t give out my number.”
A few days later, as Terresa was pulling up the driveway of her parents’ home after work, her mom came running out to the car.
“Gary Allan’s on the phone for you!”
Terresa was rushing to get her daughter, Lauren, ready for cheerleading practice, so she was slightly annoyed as she picked up the phone, wondering which of her friends was pulling a prank. But it really was Gary, calling from Salt Lake City where his ex-wife lived, visiting his kids.
“How in the world did you get my number?” she asked him.
“Your friend gave it to me,” he told her, declining to specify which friend.
Gary invited her to another concert, this time in Killeen, Texas, more than a two-hour drive south. Terresa drove there with another girlfriend and, when they arrived, they got the VIP treatment, hanging out on the bus and drinking beers with the bandmates. Gary, who is a good-looking California dude with the swagger of a rock star, did his best to impress. Luckily for me, Terresa was oblivious.
“He must have thought I was such a music dork,” Terresa told me later, convinced that, to him, she was nothing more than a fan.
Although we were on a break, we were still communicating. She called to ask me if I was the one who gave him her number. As if! Suddenly I felt competitive, and the four-week break was cut short at two weeks. I was always serious about Terresa, but now I knew I had to up my game before she was stolen from me. I must have interviewed him more than a hundred times since, but I never mentioned the fact that he tried courting my girl! No one knew, until now.
Soon after Terresa and I got back together, I decided it was time for us to take it to the next level. I found an apartment big enough for the three of us in Irving, less than a twenty-minute commute from work.
“I have a surprise for you,” I told her on the way there, dropping silly hints about what that might be. “It has cows.”
“Are we going to the stock show?” she asked, showing her “Texas” as she genuinely thought this was a possibility.
When we arrived at the condos, Terresa squealed. Not only was she thrilled to be getting out from under the watchful eyes of her parents, but our new home happened to be across the street from where her beloved Dallas Cowboys practiced.
Terresa got pregnant soon after we moved in together. We had a shotgun wedding in front of a justice of the peace. She didn’t care about a big wedding because she’d already had one the first time around, but she was worried I’d feel like I was missing out. As far as I was concerned, I’d already won the prize: an adorable little family that could grace the filler photos they use to sell picture frames.
Terresa also graced me with a willingness to embrace the Mormon faith. Having been raised in a religious family, similar to me, it wasn’t such a huge leap for Terresa to accept a different set of miracles. She did her own research and made her own decisions about what she believed. She approached the whole conversion process with humility and an open mind, telling herself, My way is not always the right way, so let’s see.
Her parents, like mine, had concerns, but, as she put it, “They know I am a grown-ass woman and if I felt it was not right, I would not do it.”
As much as she embraced my faith and supported my career with her whole being, Terresa was always her own woman. She didn’t need to, but she insisted on working. We had only one car, which I needed to drive to the station, so she found a job at a Mexican restaurant in a strip mall down the road that was a walkable distance and worked there before and after our daughter Makayla was born, working the lunch shift while a neighbor watched the baby. Not long after giving birth, she also got it into her head to try out for the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, which had long been a dream of hers. She almost made the team.
A few years later, we built our own dream home in the suburbs. By then Terresa was pregnant with our second child, Landon, and motherhood became her full-time occupation, taking the kids to and from school, dance practice, and little league games. My career at The Wolf was taking off, our family was growing, and our life had settled into a satisfying rhythm of love, faith, and work.
Being a parent became my greatest joy. Landon was my Mini-Me who shared my passions, from his near-obsessive collection of Matchbox cars as a little boy, to his ear for music. But I was in awe of Makayla’s dainty girlishness. Terresa always made sure the girls were dressed in the cutest outfits. Everything about Makayla was immaculate, from her blonde hair to her pretty pink fingernails. She was my little ball of sunshine. All three of our kids were the gifts Terresa gave me.
On the radio, everyone knew me as that family guy. I was always talking about my kids. I shared how Makayla was filled with energy, always giggling. She brought the electricity to our family from the first time she opened her eyes. One of my most famous “bits” that we incorporated into our radio format was a phone-in contest called “What’s Landon Saying?,” based on recordings of my two-year-old son’s incomprehensible streams of toddler-ese. Again, with the dad-joke humor!
People often ask me how, as a gay man, I could possibly have been happy in a straight marriage. There is only one answer to that question: Terresa. This beer-drinking, horse-riding, country-music-loving Texas blonde bombshell was the only woman I could ever imagine building a life with. Of course, I was fresh off my Mormon mission, so I had marriage on the brain. The Mormons believe that being married brings you closer to God, and I had hoped it would change me and make me 100 percent right in God’s eyes. But I couldn’t have made it work with just anyone. Terresa was perfect for me in every way because we shared the same values. She had a generosity of spirit that put others first, me especially. If only everyone could experience having a person in their lives who is all the above.
Don’t get me wrong, we also had real chemistry. It wasn’t exactly the kind where you lock eyes with someone across the room and are overcome with desire, at least not for me. I’ve only ever experienced that kind of passion with a man. But human sexuality is fluid and complicated. We don’t all fit in a specific box. Having someone be that attracted to you can be a turn-on in its own way. Terresa always made me feel safe and unconditionally loved. Despite my lack of experience, doubts, and fears, I couldn’t resist her charms.
Against the odds, I’d created a life with a loving, accepting, and supportive partner who built up my confidence with a devotion I never imagined possible. Anyone who meets Terresa immediately understands why it took me so long to leave her, even though I knew I was gay. She is that special, and I have thanked God every day for bringing her into my life. The kid in high school who never thought he could get or deserve a loving woman, much less a beauty with a heart bigger than Texas, kept playing the movie in his head, and it was as close to perfect as it could be.
by Makayla, Cody’s daughter
FIRST OFF, I HAVE THE coolest dad in the world. From my earliest childhood in Texas to church life in Salt Lake, to my young adult life in Nashville, I have nothing but happy memories.
He is so caring. He’d drop anything to do anything for anyone. Growing up Mormon meant there were rules, of course, and my father always made sure we understood the importance of working hard for what you want. But he always managed to teach us lessons in that “fun dad” way of his.
When I turned sixteen, he surprised me with the keys to his old Lexus. Dad loved that car, which he’d owned for ten years. He knew I’d always dreamed of driving it, but it wasn’t long before I totaled it. I was driving home from dance class in the pouring rain, going fifteen miles per hour, when someone slammed the brakes in front of me, and I rear-ended them. I was sobbing, and I thought, Dad is going to kill me! But when he came to pick me up, he didn’t even look at his car. All that mattered to him was that I was okay.
Soon after, Dad decided to buy me another car. I told him I would drive anything, but said, “Please don’t make me drive a Corolla.” Sure enough, it was a Corolla. When we pulled up to the bank parking lot, where my father picked up the money order to pay for the car, I screamed, “Noooooooo, Dad, noooooo!”
As I continued to whine, Dad chuckled, handed over the payment to the previous owner, then gave me the keys. Poor Landon had to drive that thing a few years later, after I finally got a new car. My father had a special fondness for this model. He’s always been a big believer in their safety and reliability, ever since he had to drive an old rust-bucket Corolla when he was a teenager. But the message for me was clear: if I wanted something better, I’d have to earn it.
Over time, I actually grew to love that car. We still have it. We keep it in the driveway in case any of the family’s other vehicles need servicing. We call her Carol. Carol the Corolla.
A legend.