Chapter 4
GARY
Iknew something was off with Opal. I'm not blind.
You don't stay married thirty-one years without learning the weather in your own house, and the weather had turned.
She'd gone quiet — not her regular quiet, which has humming in it, but a flat, still quiet, like a pond right before the wind picks up.
I didn't much like standing at the edge of it.
So I did what I do. Found the problem and fixed it.
The way I had it figured, it came down to the ribbon.
She'd won the thing — first place, no small deal — and where'd it end up?
In the drawer by the stove with the spatulas.
I'd watched her put it there. A woman takes the whole county and files the proof next to the measuring spoons, that's your problem right there.
Too modest. Hides her own light. Somebody's got to hang the thing up for her, and if she won't, that's a job for a husband.
I went to the craft store out by the interstate on my lunch that Thursday.
I don't go in places like that — smells like potpourri and hot glue — but a girl in an apron pointed me to the shadow boxes, and there it was, made for exactly this.
Little wood frame, glass front, velvet backing the green of a good lawn, one gold pin sewn in the middle to hold a ribbon out flat so the light could get at it.
Ribbon display, the tag said. Twenty-two ninety-nine.
I bought it feeling like a man solving something.
I even planned it out. Waited till after supper Friday, dishes done, her sitting down — you want a woman sitting down for a thing like this.
I'd taken the blue ribbon out of the drawer that afternoon and pinned it into the box myself, flat and shining on the green, and wrapped the whole works in a grocery bag because I don't own wrapping paper.
Carried it in behind my back like a kid.
"Got you something," I said. "Close your eyes."
She closed them. Played along, even, and for a second the pond had a little sun on it and I thought, there we go, there's your girl coming back.
"Okay," I said. "Look."
She opened her eyes, and I held it out — box, glass, blue ribbon bright on the green, first place, right there where anybody could see it. I stood there proud as a new father.
She looked at it a long time. Longer than I figured.
Something went across her face I couldn't read, which is rare, because I can usually read her.
And I stood there with my arms still half out, waiting on the thank-you, waiting on the part I'd already run in my head where she gets up and hugs my neck and the sun comes back on the water.
"You framed the one my silence hasn't touched yet," she said.
I stood there holding the box in both hands. "It's the blue one. First place. Figured we'd hang it in the front room. Let it be seen."
"It's the one from two weeks ago, Gary." Quiet, not mean, which was somehow worse than mean. "The new one. The loud one. You picked the ribbon everybody already knows about and put it under glass." She stood up. "There's thirty years in that drawer. You framed the two weeks that already got out."
"Opal—"
"It's a nice box," she said, and I could tell she meant that part, which threw me sideways.
"It's a real nice box." Then she went down the hall to run her bath and left me standing in the middle of the front room holding twenty-two dollars of glass and velvet, feeling like I'd swung at a ball that wasn't there.
I set the box on the mantel. Then I moved it, because it looked wrong up there by the cups, though I couldn't have told you why — like the mantel spat it out, this one bright new thing that didn't match the row of me.
I leaned it on the bookshelf instead. It caught the lamplight.
First place. And I could not for the life of me see what I'd done wrong, only that I'd done it, the way you know it by the set of a woman's back going down a hall.
She was in the bath a long time. I sat in the front room with the TV off, the house ticking the way it does cooling down, and looked at that shadow box and kept waiting for it to start feeling like the fix I'd been so sure of in the store.
It didn't. It just sat there being a nice box with the loudest ribbon in it, and down the hall the water ran, and for the first time I had the cold thought that I'd solved a problem she never asked me to solve and walked right past the one she had.
There's thirty years in that drawer.
I don't know what got into me. Call it curiosity. Or the thing under curiosity I wouldn't have named. I went in the kitchen and opened the drawer by the stove, the deep one that sticks, had to lean on it to get it going.
I hadn't looked in there in — I couldn't tell you.
Years. It was her drawer. A man knows which drawers are his wife's the way he knows her side of the bed, without ever deciding it.
I'd known there were ribbons in it the way you know there's a church in a town you drive through. There. Not looked at.
There were a lot of them.
I started taking them out. Don't know why I started counting, except keeping score is just how my head runs, always has, since I was a boy — I count strokes, I count sales, I count the years on a truck.
So I counted. Reds and blues and whites, some gone soft as cloth with age, pins browned, little cards under them in her hand.
County fair. State qualifier. Church bazaar, best in show.
A blue from a year I could do the math on and land on a summer I barely remembered — one I'd have sworn was all mine.
Good sales year, club championship, a truck I was proud of.
Couldn't have told you one thing Opal did that whole summer.
Turned out she took a blue in it, and I stood in this same kitchen and never knew, or knew and didn't keep it. Either way it came to the same drawer.
I laid them out on the counter in a row the way I lay out anything I'm counting.
One, two, three. Got to nine and had to start a second row.
Got past twelve and something started up in my chest I didn't have a use for, a low pressure, like the sixteenth hole of a round you're up on by too much to lose and are somehow losing anyway.
Fifteen. Sixteen. Every one of them a Saturday I'd been off somewhere else. Every one a jar of hers that beat forty other people's and went in this drawer and never once came out into my mother's kitchen or Deke's laugh or the boys' phones. Seventeen. Eighteen.
Nineteen.
I stopped at nineteen. I'd like to say I chose to, but my hands just quit.
It was hot in that kitchen — damn hot, August leaning on the windows — and I told myself that was all it was.
A man gets light-headed counting in a hot kitchen at ten at night.
I dragged my hand across my face and it came away wet.
Down the wall, the bathwater started draining. She'd be out soon.
I stood there with nineteen ribbons on the counter and the drawer still half full behind them, and I couldn't finish, and couldn't have told you why not.
Told myself it was the heat. Told myself I'd count the rest tomorrow.
I put them back fast, not neat, the way you shove a thing back when you don't want to be caught holding it, and leaned my hip on the drawer to make it go — a catch, then a thud, the same fight it always gave her.
I left the shadow box on the shelf with the loud ribbon in it and went to bed before she came out.
Lay there in the dark next to the warm empty space where she'd be, thinking about the number nineteen and the drawer that had more, telling myself again, almost out loud, that it was only the heat.
It was August. That's what I told myself, lying there sweating, not sleeping, listening to the pipe tick cool in the wall.