Cori Gail Harris wasn’t feeling great this past August when a man who reminded her of a character from “The Lord of the Rings” pushed his cart into her lane at the IGA supermarket.
Ms. Harris, 53, had been a cashier since July at the St. Stephen, S.C., store and was still getting used to the physical demands of the job. “I was standing on my feet for four-hour shifts, and my body could barely handle three hours,” she said. But the 6-foot-8 man with the long white beard stacking his groceries on the conveyor belt momentarily distracted her from her aches and pains. “I thought, wow, the Lord just sent me my own Gandalf, the White.”
That man, Edgar Lee Hayes, 78, was no wizard, though he acknowledged a magic wand might have come in handy at the time. He, too, had been feeling unwell. And in the 15 years since his wife had died of heart failure, his strategy for finding someone new to date — “I was waiting for God to drop somebody out of the sky,” he said — hadn’t been fruitful. In the space of a few scanned items, he developed a crush on the new cashier.
Ms. Harris is originally from Homer, Mich. She was divorced after a brief marriage in 1992 and has two daughters, ages 36 and 20. Her route to Bonneau Beach, S.C., where she and her younger daughter, Zoey, were living when she started working at IGA, involves a detour through Hazard, Ky. In 2013, she moved there and became financially dependent on a boyfriend. When they broke up in 2020, she returned to Michigan but was unable to find stable work and housing during the pandemic.
“My daughter and I and our two cats were seriously about to go to a homeless shelter,” she said. In December 2023, a friend she had never met in person but got to know through the online horse adventure game Star Stable offered to help. “I didn’t have a vehicle, and I didn’t have any money, but Diane said, ‘We’re coming to get you.’”
Ms. Harris’s professional background is in data entry. She had hoped to find clerical work when she and Zoey moved their few possessions into the Bonneau Beach home of Diane and Fred Varvell a year ago. But after the couple returned home from a summer grocery shopping trip and told her IGA was hiring, she applied. Though the work was taxing on her body — she attributes her discomfort to scoliosis — it had its rewards.
“I didn’t think I was going to like it, but after about two weeks I started getting used to the regular customers,” she said. “Everybody’s friendly. And I would see miracles every day, like somebody paying someone else’s bill because they were a few dollars short.”
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Mr. Hayes, of St. Stephen, is an Army veteran originally from Charleston, S.C. Before his wife died in 2009, he was divorced from a first wife in 1974. His 13 children range in age from their early 30s to early 50s. He had been retired since 2002 from a career doing mechanical work on trains and at construction sites when he started looking forward to seeing Ms. Harris behind her register this past summer.
“It was her smile, her friendliness,” he said.
Ms. Harris had been secretly hoping he might be attracted to her when, on Nov. 5, he steered his cart into her lane and asked if she would consider having lunch with him. Saying yes gave her something to look forward to. But it also sent her into a spiral of worry. She didn’t have a car and wasn’t sure he would be willing to pick her up from the Varvell home, 15 minutes from the store. That concern was allayed when he offered to wait for her shift to end so he could drive her back to Bonneau Beach and learn the route.
The ride home in his black Nissan Rogue lasted longer than both expected. “Everything about our lives came out in that car ride,” she said, including Mr. Hayes’s recent lung cancer diagnosis. Outside the Varvell home, they parked and talked for hours. “He let me know he was getting ready to go through treatments all by himself, and he asked me if I would be his companion, because he wasn’t sure he would be able to drive after.”
By the time she went inside, she had agreed to that and more. “I didn’t intend to propose,” Mr. Hayes said. “But the way she was telling me what she was looking for in a companion — I just said, ‘Well, if you ever met somebody like that would you consider marrying him?’” Five minutes later, they were engaged. Their first date, at the Watermark Bar and Grill in Bonneau, S.C., came days later.
Ms. Harris had been accompanying Mr. Hayes to his radiation appointments at Trident Medical Center in Charleston several weeks when their plan to marry at Mr. Hayes’s brother’s house on Dec. 12 started to unravel. He and his first wife had been married by a military chaplain. “So the thought popped into my mind, why not get married by a chaplain at the V. A.?”
Ms. Harris knew Trident had its own chaplain. She suggested they marry there. On Dec. 5, they met with the Rev. DeMett Jenkins, the medical center’s director of spiritual care and outreach. The next day, Chrystal Wilson, the director of the cancer center, signed off on a wedding.
On Dec. 12, 40 guests, including doctors and nurses, filed into a waiting room outfitted with a rented arch. Ms. Harris wore a violet dress gifted by a local boutique, Ash and T’s Formals; Mr. Hayes wore a gray tuxedo lent by Men’s Wearhouse. Robert Sloan, Trident’s associate chaplain, officiated a short, religious ceremony followed by a reception with hors d’oeuvres, punch and wedding cake.
Ms. Harris and Zoey, who walked her mother down the aisle, had barely finished moving into Mr. Hayes’s house in time for the wedding. But planning hadn’t required the bride or groom to do any heavy lifting. “They did everything,” she said of the Trident staff. “It was so beautiful. No one could have done it better.”
In January, Mr. Hayes will undergo a CT scan to determine whether his cancer treatments have been successful. Regardless of the outcome, he is grateful for the turn his life has taken since meeting Ms. Harris. “This whole thing from day one has felt like a script,” he said.
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