Chapter 2
OPAL
Gary got home Sunday afternoon smelling of sun and clubhouse beer, his neck burned pink above the collar, the trophy riding shotgun.
Second flight — a gold-colored cup on a wooden base with a little brass plate that had his name and the year on it.
He carried it in ahead of his clubs, ahead of his bag.
"Second flight's nothing to sneeze at," he said, setting it on the island where the light would catch it. "Deke shot lights-out on the back and I still took him. Fella from Delacroix said he's never seen a man read a green like me."
"That's wonderful," I said, and I meant it. I loved that he came home lit up like that, loved his win.
He carried the cup through to the front room and set it on the mantel with the others.
He had a whole row by then, mostly golf, going back years, and the big one in the middle that never moved.
I'd dusted that row a thousand times. I knew the weight of every cup, which ones tarnished, which base had come unglued and gotten fixed with the wood glue out of the junk drawer.
I knew that mantel better than he did, the way you know a thing you clean but don't own.
He stepped back and checked the spacing like he always does, nudged the new one a half inch left, nodded at it.
Then he came back to the kitchen and kissed me proper.
"So. Where's my blue-ribbon girl taking me for that steak? "
We went to the Cattleman's, the back booth he always asks for and always gets, because the girl up front knows him.
Everybody knows Gary. He shook two hands on the way to the table and told the waitress it was a celebration, and when she asked what for he said, "Took second flight over in Delacroix this weekend.
" She said congratulations. He grinned. I buttered my roll and waited, because any second now he'd tell her the other half.
He didn't tell her the other half. She topped off our waters and moved on, and it closed over smooth, like water over a dropped stone.
I noticed it the way you notice a stair that isn't there — that little lurch, gone before you can name it. I told myself he'd just forgotten in the moment. Two beers in him, his weekend too. I let it go.
I set the blue-ribbon jar on the windowsill over the sink where I'd see it while I worked.
The card I read alone that first night, in the pantry with the door half shut, like a girl with a note she didn't want caught reading.
Perfect set. Clean, bright flavor, true to fruit.
Best in show consideration. I read it four times.
Then I slid it into the deep drawer by the stove, on top of the others.
That was Sunday.
Monday I drove my route. Tuesday, Louise called.
Louise is Gary's mother — eighty-one, sharp as a tack in a shoe, still out on the county road in the house Gary grew up in.
She calls me Tuesdays. Always has. Gary calls her Sundays, and she says she likes to hear from the half of us that listens.
We got through her knee and the preacher's new wife and whether I'd run her to the foot doctor Thursday.
Then, easy, just filling the gap, she said, "Your Gary sounded pleased as punch on the phone. That golf cup. Carried on about it a good ten minutes. You'd think he'd cured something."
"He earned it," I said. "Played well."
"I'm sure. And how'd your fair go, honey? You always do the jam this time of year."
There it was again. That stair.
"It went fine," I said, and my voice came out level, and I was proud of how level it came out. "Berries were good this year."
"That's nice," she said, and moved on to the foot doctor, because I'd handed her nothing to hold on to.
I sat there with the phone in my lap a while after we hung up.
Ten minutes to his mother about a second-flight cup.
He'd called her Sunday — two days after I won — and never once said the word ribbon.
She didn't know. She'd asked me straight out, and there'd been nothing in her voice but the plain politeness of a woman asking after a thing she figured hadn't happened.
I could've told her right then. Louise, I took first out of forty-one. I didn't. Some old habit of waiting to be handed the microphone, maybe. Or some stubborn corner of me wanting to see how far the quiet would run if I didn't fill it myself.
Thursday I took Louise to the foot doctor. Friday I stopped at the Piggly Wiggly for canning sugar — forty pounds of it, the cart hauling to one side.
Marlene found me in the baking aisle. Deke's wife, big laugh, big rings, married to Gary's golf partner going on twenty years.
She grabbed my cart like it was a handshake.
"Opal! Lord, I've been hearing about that man of yours all week.
Deke came home Sunday just sick about that cup.
Says Gary's been texting the pictures around like a proud papa.
" That big laugh. "Sent Deke the scorecard, sent the boys the trophy up on the mantel — Deke showed me, Gary standing there with it like he'd won the Masters.
I told Deke, that Gary Deene, he does love a spotlight. "
I held on to the cart. "He does."
"What's your news, hon? You've always got something canning."
"Nothing much," I heard myself say. "Just the usual."
She patted my arm and rolled off toward the flour, and I stood there next to forty pounds of sugar with my ears ringing.
He'd sent it all around. The scorecard, the trophy. Inside the hour, if I knew Gary — and I knew Gary.
I got home and put the sugar away and then did a thing I'm not proud of.
I picked up my phone and opened the group thread, the one with Deke and Ron and the other two that Gary leaves lying open on the counter half the time, and scrolled back to Saturday.
There it was. Three forty-one in the afternoon — the same stretch of the day I'd been standing in that empty hall with a warm blue ribbon in my hand.
A photo of the scorecard. A photo of him holding the cup outside the clubhouse, squinting into the sun, grinning.
Second flight, boys. Read the greens like a book.
Ron sent a crown. Deke sent three beer mugs. It ran a screen and a half.
Three forty-one. I checked the timestamp twice.
I'd called him at three-oh-five to say I'd won.
He'd said that's my girl and nobody makes it like you and we'll celebrate — and then, thirty-six minutes later, he'd photographed his own cup and sent it to five men, and in that message and every one after it there wasn't a word about me.
He knew how to do it. That's what took the floor out from under me.
He knew exactly how to move a piece of news — could get a scorecard out of a Delacroix clubhouse and into five phones across three counties inside an hour, with a caption, with a joke.
The machinery worked fine. It just never once turned my way.
I made supper — pork chops, the applesauce I'd put up in the spring. He ate two chops and told me about a combine deal set to close Tuesday. I waited till the plates were cleared. I've learned not to do it over food.
"Gary," I said. "Did you tell your mother about my ribbon?"
He looked up from his phone, honest as a dog. "Your ribbon?"
"The blue ribbon. First place. Saturday."
"Course I know about your ribbon, hon, I was on the phone with you." He smiled, not seeing the ground open under him. "Why would I call Mom about it?"
"You called her Sunday. Talked about your cup for ten minutes."
"Well — yeah. She asks about my golf." He set the phone down, which for Gary is a large motion. "Opal, what's this about?"
"Did you tell anybody? Deke, Ron, the boys? Marlene knew every stitch of your weekend today. She didn't know I'd entered."
He rubbed the back of his sunburned neck, and I watched it cross his face — not guilt, which would've been easier, but honest bafflement.
"I figured you'd tell people, hon. If you wanted them to know.
It's your thing. I didn't think you'd want me — I don't know — announcing your jam.
" He said it gently, and that was the worst of it.
Like a kindness. "You're private about your stuff. "
"You announced your cup to five men in thirty-six minutes."
"That's different. That's the boys, that's just — that's how we—" He stopped. He didn't have the end of it.
"Finish it," I said. "That's how we what."
"That's how we talk. Golf, scores, deals. It's the — it's what goes back and forth." He rubbed his neck again. "Your jam's not — it's not that kind of thing."
"My jam's not currency." I let it sit on the table between us. "You just told me my thirty years aren't the kind of thing that goes back and forth. You hear yourself?"
"That's not — Opal, that's not what I—" He put both hands flat on the table like he could hold the sentence still. "I told you you did great. I meant it. I'll tell whoever you want. You want me to text the boys? I'll do it right now."
"No," I said.
"Then what do you want?"
I didn't have a clean answer, not that night. I had a feeling the size of the county and no words small enough to hand him across a table. "Nothing," I said. "Finish your combine deal." And I got up and cleared the last of the plates.
The jar was still on the windowsill, ribbon pinned to the card.
I carried it to the deep drawer by the stove and opened it, and there they all were — every ribbon I'd ever taken, thirty years of them, reds and whites and the blues, gone flat and faded, some of the pins rusted, the judges' cards stacked underneath like receipts for something nobody bought.
I laid the new one on top. It was the brightest thing in there by ten years.
Then I pushed the drawer shut. It stuck on the swollen wood the way it always does, so I had to lean my hip in to seat it — a catch, then a thud, like a door arguing before it agrees to stay closed.
And the ribbon was on the inside now with all the rest, where the light doesn't reach, where my husband would never once in thirty years have to look at what my hands could do.