At the cookout, the firefighter wasn’t so hot.
On the day Megan Hicks arrived early to a neighbor’s cookout, in part to meet a firefighter the neighbor had set her up with, there were a couple of big changes in the works. The first is that Hicks would indeed meet her future husband that day. The second is that this neighbor was to become her motherin-law.
The firefighter didn’t show up early, but Nehemiah Holt did.
“I got there early because, you know, it was my mom’s house,” Nehemiah says.
He and Megan got a chance to talk and get to know each other before the rest of the crowd, including her “date,” arrived.
Megan was in Jonesboro that day to tidy up after movers who had picked up her belongings the day before and driven them to her new home in Little Rock.
In the years since Megan had divorced, her neighbor, Brenda Sipa, had tried to fix her up with several guys, mostly firefighters she met through her job at the fire department. None of them had been right for Megan, though. And since Megan had moved now, this was probably the last time Sipa would try to set Megan up with anyone.
“Nehemiah was very gentlemanly and polite, and he was very funny … and he was interested in everything I said,” Megan says. “But after all that time he didn’t ask for my phone number so I didn’t really know if he was interested.”
As more people showed up, there were a couple of guys who came on strong to Megan. At one point Nehemiah jokingly invited her to come over and sit with him so one of the guys would leave her alone.
When the firefighter arrived and Sipa called Megan over to meet him, Megan felt obligated to say hello.
“I knew I had liked Nehemiah right away when we were there,” she says. “I told his mom that later. But I left that night with the other guy’s phone number.”
“I’m a fairly shy person, especially when it comes to women, so I probably wouldn’t have approached her to even talk to her” if she hadn’t arrived early at his mom’s house. “There was really no one else around then, so we sat and talked for a while. I’m glad we did.”
So, then, why hadn’t Nehemiah’s mom tried to match the two herself? When the couple retrace their separate time lines, each time Megan was single, Nehemiah was in a relationship, and vice versa.
In fact, the night of the cookout, Nehemiah was in the process of ending a relationship and was not ready to begin another one. He hadn’t been focused on picking Megan up.
“I was just being myself,” he says.
When he was ready, in September 2009, he sent Megan an email, and after chatting for a while that way, they started talking on the phone. With their chemistry clearly established, Nehemiah asked her for a date.
“He asked if I would like to go to dinner, and then he said, ‘Well, I’m a pretty good cook. I could cook for you,’” Megan says.
Megan was spending the weekend with her parents in Jonesboro before her first date with Nehemiah, so he asked her to drop by a furniture store in town and give him her opinion on a table and some artwork he was thinking of buying.
She liked his choices, although she was unaware that his reason for buying the table was so that they would have a place to sit down for dinner when she came over.
“I didn’t really have that much furniture,” he says. “I was a little embarrassed.”
The table wasn’t delivered in time for that date, so they ate Nehemiah’s homemade chicken lasagna on the couch.
“It was a total bachelor pad,” she laughs. “But dinner was delicious. That’s still one of my favorite meals that he makes.”
Nehemiah proposed around Valentine’s Day 2010.
It had been a fairly short long-distance relationship thus far, but Megan had no doubts.
“He really seemed to want to be a family man,” she says. “And I knew his mom. I knew her well enough to know what kind of man she [raised].”
They exchanged their vows on Aug. 28, 2010, at The White House Inn, a bed and breakfast in Paragould.
Megan is the director of clinical services at the Bridgeway Hospital in North Little Rock. Nehemiah has a business cleaning windows in new houses.
They live in Little Rock with Megan’s sons from a previous marriage, 11-year-old Ethan and 8-year-old Keegan.
As for the table Nehemiah bought special for his first date with Megan, “It’s the one we use in our house now.”