The Blue Ribbon He Never Mentioned (Marriage In Crisis #27)

Chapter 1

OPAL

The kitchen was already ninety-four degrees by ten, and I'd shut the windows against the wasps that came for the sugar smell every August. My grandmother taught me to work in that kind of heat.

A jam that scared you a little, she said, was a jam that would set.

So I stood over the stove with sweat running down my spine, stirring four quarts of strawberries down into something that would outlast the summer.

I've never used a thermometer. My grandmother would've laughed at one.

You learn the sheet or you don't learn anything, she'd say — so I lifted the spoon and let the hot preserve run off the edge, waiting for the moment two drops pulled into one and hung there, folding off the metal in a curtain instead of dripping.

Thirty years, and my hands still knew that fold better than any gauge could tell me.

Not yet. Close.

I stirred another minute and skimmed the pink foam into a saucer. Gary liked it on toast, standing at the counter in his golf shirt with his phone in the other hand, reading me the tee time.

He'd been gone since before six that Saturday.

The county fair falls on the same weekend as his men's tournament over in Delacroix every year, and he'd left with his clubs rattling in the trunk and a travel mug of the coffee I'd set up the night before.

Kissed the top of my head, said good luck with your jars, hon, in that easy warm way he says most things, and then the garage door went up and down and the house was mine.

I didn't mind. There's a particular quiet to a fair morning that I've always liked — the jars lined up on the towel, all twelve scalded till the glass squeaked, the lids ticking in their little pan, the funnel, the headspace I measure with the tip of my finger.

I filled them one at a time and wiped every rim with a vinegar cloth so nothing would spoil the seal, then set the lids and turned the bands to fingertip tight and no tighter.

Crank a band down and it'll fight the vacuum and lose.

The label gun was by the sink. I ran two labels for the fair jar — one for the lid, one for the shoulder — and pressed them flat with my thumbnail. Strawberry. The date. My initials down in the corner, small, the way I've always done them. O.D. I wanted them read. I just wanted them read quietly.

By eleven the entry jar was wrapped in a dish towel and riding in the footwell of the car so it wouldn't knock.

The fairgrounds sit out past the reservoir, and the lot was already filling up — pickups, church vans, a man selling kettle corn off a trailer.

I carried my jar in like it was asleep. Inside, the exhibition hall smelled of hay and floor wax and the sweetness of forty other people's sugar.

The preserves ran the length of the north wall.

I set my jar in the strawberry section and made myself not study the competition too hard — that's a rule I made years ago.

You win in your own kitchen the week before, or you don't win at all.

But I saw them anyway. Corinne Yoder's, loose as always.

A bright jewel-red one from somebody new that tightened my stomach till I caught the little bubbles up near the top — a hard boil, which meant she'd rushed it.

I filled out my card. Class 14, strawberry preserves.

Number forty-one — forty-one entries this year, the woman at the table said, most she'd seen since the fire took the old hall.

She was new, young, and she picked my jar up to write the number and held it to the light without thinking anything of it, just checking the fill.

"That's a pretty set," she said, and put it down.

She could see it right through the glass, no name on it, nobody to vouch for it.

The jam told her itself. She slid the number under the jar, and that was all I could do.

The judging was closed — no names on the judges' side, only the numbers, so the ribbon goes to the work and not the face.

I drove home the long way, past the Hollis field and the church and the turnoff to Delacroix, where somewhere on a green Gary was reading the wind off a flag.

He texted me at one: a photo of his scorecard, Even par on the front, watch out.

I sent a thumbs-up from a stoplight. He was having his day. I was having mine — quieter, but mine.

Results posted at two-thirty. I didn't go back for them; that's another rule, no standing over the table like a mother outside a classroom.

I put up the rest of the batch instead, six more jars for the shelf and the gift box, and labeled every one, and listened to the seals draw down as they cooled — that small clean pop, one after another, each jar doing exactly what I'd asked of it.

I don't know there's a sound I love better.

Suzette from the gift shop called after lunch about the fall order, and we talked cases and headcount while I scrubbed the canner with the phone hot against my ear. The tourists had cleaned her out of peach by July, she said. I told her I'd have numbers Monday.

The fair called at two-forty.

It was Deb Frawley, who runs that exhibition hall the way some women run a church. No hello. "Opal Deene, you'd better get down here and see what your jar did."

I set the dish towel on the counter, careful, the way you set a thing down when your hands have quit being reliable.

"Which color," I said.

"You come see."

The drive back felt twice as long. I kept to the limit and made myself not build it up. I'd built things up before and had the air let out of them, and a woman my age ought to know better. But my hands were light on the wheel the whole way there.

The hall had mostly emptied out by then, just Deb and a couple of families drifting the tables. I walked the north wall to Class 14, to number forty-one, to my jar in its plain glass with my initials small in the corner.

Blue.

Deep, true blue with the gold stamp in the middle, pinned to the card in front of the jar. First place. First out of forty-one. I stood there reading the word until it quit meaning anything.

Deb came up next to me with her clipboard against her chest. "Judges wrote you a card, too," she said. "They don't always. Read it at home, not with me breathing on you."

I picked up the jar. Still warm from the light through the high windows, or I told myself it was. The ribbon swung when I lifted the card, a little bright flag of a thing, and before I could stop it the thought came up clear as a bell — I have to tell Gary.

He picked up on the second ring. Wind in the phone, men's voices behind him, the clink of a clubhouse.

"Hon," he said. "You are not gonna believe the putt I just sank on eighteen. Deke owes me lunch for a month."

"I won," I said. "Blue ribbon. First place. Forty-one entries."

There was a pause, and in it I heard him step away from the noise, and when he came back his voice was all mine — warm, proud, real.

"Opal. Baby. That's my girl. First place, 'course you did — nobody makes it like you." He laughed. "You beat every jam in the county. That's — hey, that's really something."

My eyes stung and I let them. "It is something," I said.

"We'll celebrate tomorrow when I'm home. Steak. You pick the place."

"Okay."

"I gotta run, they're calling second flight. But Opal — first place. Damn." Another whoop behind him, and he was gone.

I stood in the empty hall with the phone warm in one hand and the jar warm in the other and told myself that was enough. He'd said the right things, and he'd meant them. I could hear that he'd meant them.

I carried the jar back out to the car in the long gold light and set it in the footwell in its towel so it wouldn't knock. I drove home the long way again, past the church, past the Hollis field going to shadow. The ribbon lay flat and bright on the seat beside me, catching the last of the sun.