Hitched

Matthew Litkie's a good man. At 49, this well-organized bookkeeper often stays up late making sure his records are straight. He's been the president of his local neighborhood-watch group for eight years. If he says he'll be somewhere at a certain time, dammit, he'll be there. Such traits are essential for a self-employed painting contractor who's frequently handed the keys to posh Lake Oswego mansions for weeks at a time.

"They need to trust me," he says.

Matthew's proud of his good standing but also confesses he's been misleading his clients for quite a while.

"This may ruin my reputation, but I've been calling Roxanne my wife this whole time," he says with a chuckle in his throat. A married man is a stable man, he reasoned.

Roxanne, 46, doesn't mind Matthew's fibbing. She admits it sounds strange calling him "husband" after 17 years of shacking up but is glad that her Mother's Day card could finally, and legitimately, say "wife."

The two met as single parents while in their early 30s. Both were scarred from previous marriages, trying to raise three toddlers apiece, and neither wanted to jump into a relationship.

"We both said, 'Stay away from me!'" remembers Matthew. But the attraction was there; soon enough, the two crowded into a rented two-bedroom house in the Lents neighborhood with their combined six children. That was 1986.

Over the years, city life started to wear on this country-raised couple. The kids started falling in with the wrong crowds. The couple thought about marriage, but then one of the exes would come around and cause trouble. It was time to slow down a little, they decided, maybe live by a river. "One day I said, 'That's it. We're moving to Estacada, and getting some pigs and goats,'" remembers Matthew.

In the end, the couple decided to live in the woods. Troublemakers don't come up that way, Matthew says. And so, in 1993, they packed up their things, headed up Highway 26 to Sandy and moved into an early-'50s farmhouse on a nice, fertile plot of land. Both spend a good amount of time on the daily commute to jobs in the Willamette Valley, but it's worth it, they say. Though they opted against farm animals, they do have their garden, where in the summer they grow more corn than they can eat and more raspberries than they can pick. And they have lots of flowers: "Hundreds," says Matthew proudly, spreading his arms wide over his backyard landscape.

"We live four miles from the national forest and eight from the end of the road," he says, though the extended winter started to get to him. "It's like Russia up here at 1,700 feet."

Though the kids are grown now and live down the mountain, they still come to visit. This Thanksgiving, Matthew's oldest son came to the dinner table with some news: He and his girlfriend were getting married.

The announcement got Matthew thinking: He couldn't go to his son's wedding without being married himself. He came up with some ideal times and locations: Reno. Sunriver. Valentine's Day. Roxanne shot them all down. She's never flown before and wasn't about to board a plane for Nevada. The other options, she reckoned, would take too much planning.

They agreed that they wanted a simple wedding, though Roxanne drew the line at Matthew's "no guest" request. "We had to have witnesses," Roxanne says. The couple settled on a wedding on the beach, and borrowed Roxanne's mother's Seaside condo--but didn't invite Mom. She's a little mad, Roxanne says, but at least she's invited to the couple's reception in Sandy at the end of June.

Though Matthew Litkie can finally tell the truth after 17 years, he'll have a little explaining to do with his new mother-in-law.

WWeek 2015