Partway through a Zoom call with Mary Travis and her famous husband, Randy Travis, they suddenly disappear from the screen.
When the couple pops back into view 20 seconds later, Mary is apologizing and Randy is laughing.
"Are we back?" asks Mary, who is squeezed next to Randy in the rustic family room of the house on their ranch in Tioga, Texas (population: barely 1,000). "We're out in the country. You have to forgive me. If it just goes in and out, it's because the paper cups and the string don't work real well all the time."
Randy laughs again.
In fact, during a freewheeling, 40-minute conversation about what life has been like for the couple not just since the pandemic started but in the seven years since his devastating stroke _ the 61-year-old Country Music Hall of Famer and Marshville, North Carolina, native finds several reasons to laugh, and even more reasons to smile.
He isn't able to contribute more than a steady diet of one- or two-word answers, due to the aphasia that affects his ability to produce and comprehend speech. Instead, he relies on Mary to speak on his behalf.
By the time the chat is over, though, the most overwhelming sense you're left with is this: He seems truly happy.
"My one prayer when (he first had the stroke) _ and it happened so fast _ was 'God, please just let me have him back. Any way, shape or form,'" says Mary, who met Randy 30 years ago but didn't start dating him until 2010, after they had both gone through a divorce. (They married in 2015, two years after his stroke.)
"And God was faithful. He gave him back. And we followed that light. ... It's easy to be bitter, but it's much better to be better. So yeah, it's all positive. We stay away from the negative. They have a problem for every solution, so we don't go there."
Randy smiles, and nods.
So, what has life been like for Randy and Mary Travis lately? Perhaps not as leisurely as you might think.
They haven't been back to North Carolina since the second annual Randy Travis Music Festival last September in Marshville, the small town 35 miles southeast of Charlotte, North Carolina, where much of Randy's family still lives.
But they've been to Nashville, Tennessee, a couple of times recently, and were headed back last week, Mary said, "to pick up kind of where we left off in March with some projects."
The big one that did get done over the summer was Randy's first single since his stroke _ "Fool's Love Affair," based on a demo he recorded in 1984 _ and the couple has done a number of interviews together to help promote it since it was released on July 29. And the song has been so well-received (it was streamed more than 1 million times in its first week of release, and Mary said that just two weeks ago it was picked up by 30 radio stations in the South) that they're thinking about dusting off other unreleased material.
For the story on the song, his ongoing recovery, their perspective on the pandemic, and more, check out our interview, which has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
