Kellie Barba had just gotten out of a relationship and she wasn't looking to start another one.
She thought the guy who waited on the table where she and her friend were having dinner was cute, and she took a bold move and wrote her phone number on the back of her receipt before she left -- just for fun.
"I was not trying to find anything serious," Kellie says. "I was going to be single for a while."
It was September 2006, and the guy, Cody Oden, had recently returned to Texarkana after living with his grandparents for a while in Shreveport while he worked in acting and modeling and waited tables at Joe's Crab Shack.
"All I could think of was how much I missed Albert Pike and the Ouachitas and I kept wanting to get out in nature," he says.
He had sat in a pasture near his grandparents' house and asked God to lead him to someone who was beautiful inside and out.
One morning not long after that, as he drove to work from his grandparents' house, he swerved to avoid an oncoming 18-wheeler and wrecked, totaling his vehicle. He moved back home to Texarkana that very day, and two weeks later he met Kellie.
He had certainly thought she was beautiful when he first saw her at a table in his section with her friend that night, so much so that he had been unnerved by her.
"I was kind of geeking out," he says. "It was hard for me to act normal like I would with other guests."
Still, he wouldn't have flipped the receipt over -- he would have missed her numeric message altogether-- except that she had scrawled it in dark ink and he could see it through the front of the paper as he held it up to enter the tip into the register.
He called her at the end of his shift that night.
"He said, 'Are you a brunette?'" she says. "I'm a brunette, and my friend was a redhead."
That, he says, is what he had hoped to hear.
They met at Starbucks a few days later.
Kellie was so convinced their relationship would go nowhere that she wasn't even offended that he couldn't remember her name.
"I told her I'm really bad with names, and I couldn't remember her name," he says, adding that he kind of needed to know it to introduce her to his friends. "She said, 'I'm Kellie.' And I said, 'Thank you.'"
After hanging out with her every day for about two weeks, Cody turned to Kellie and asked what they were doing.
"She said, 'I guess we're dating,'" he says.
On Dec. 22, 2007, they went to a German restaurant in Hot Springs to celebrate Kellie's birthday. The German band serenaded Kellie with a trumpet and an accordion. Cody wanted to take her on a carriage ride after dinner but she demurred.
"I'm allergic to horses," she says. "So that wouldn't work."
They went for a stroll instead and when they found a bench by a fountain and sat down, Cody surreptitiously pulled out the engagement ring he had rolled into his sock so she would have no chance of seeing it before he was ready, and he proposed to her.
"Right after I proposed, it started snowing, so that was pretty cool," he says.
Kellie and Cody were married on May 22, 2009, in Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Texarkana.
"The 22nd is very important to us," Cody says. "Our first date was on Sept. 22, we got engaged on Dec. 22, and our wedding was on May 22."
Also, he says, he was confirmed in the Catholic Church on April 22.
"This is how chillaxed our wedding day was: We went on a six-mile bike ride around the back roads of Texarkana just like normal," he says. "Then Kellie said she was going to her mom's to get ready and said we would see each other in a few hours."
Kellie and Cody live in Little Rock. She works as a dental assistant; he is a contract accountant and owner of Dome Life. They share videos of their outdoor adventures on their YouTube channel.
"The first 10 years we were together I couldn't get Kellie to even drive down a dirt road," Cody says. "She was all heels, and loved the city."
On their sixth anniversary, in 2014, he suggested they visit Crystal Prong Creek near Flatside Wilderness. Kellie reluctantly agreed but she was not in a great mood when they arrived, but they unfolded their chairs on the banks of the clear blue water and she started to unwind and even asked if they could swim in those waters.
"She said, 'Can we come back next weekend?'" Cody says.
They have gone camping almost every weekend since.
"Now she loves the outdoors and hates being in the city," Cody says.
Kellie calls their serendipitous meeting after Cody's sudden move back to Texarkana "a weird coincidence."
And, she says, "Everything was so easy between us. It was almost like we already knew each other."
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The first time I saw my future spouse:
He says: “She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. I didn’t know how to talk to her.”
She says: “I thought he was really cute and I told my girlfriend I was going to leave him my number.”
On our wedding day:
He says: “I cried like a baby.”
She says: “Cody’s friend put tape on the bottom of Cody’s shoes that said, ‘Help me.’ But his friend is so goofy that he put it on backward.”
My advice for a long happy marriage:
He says: “Communication. If you don’t feel comfortable with the person you’re with, to tell them everything, then you don’t need to be with that person because they’re not your other half.”
She says: “For sure communication. We tell each other everything.”