Chapter 5
OPAL
Ibuilt the case the way I build a batch — slow, in order, nothing skipped.
I'd given myself nine days. From the Friday I handed him Suzette's doubled order, plain, no music, I kept a running count in my head of everything Gary sent out into the world, and let the days stack up like clean jars on a towel.
The last piece came on the ninth morning, and it came from Deke, who had no idea he was handing me anything.
He'd stopped by to drop off a saw he'd borrowed, and Gary was still in the shower, so Deke stood in my kitchen making small talk.
"Marlene's still going on about Gary's cup," he said.
"Made me put it in the album — she keeps a golf album, can you believe it, twenty years of the boys' trophies.
" He laughed. "Got a picture of every one. Yours too. I mean Gary's."
An album. Twenty years of the boys' golf, photographed and kept. And I stood there thinking about my drawer, and how there wasn't one photograph in this house of a single ribbon of mine, because you don't photograph what you keep in the dark. Deke left. I had the last brick for the wall.
That night I set the table.
I mean I set it. After supper I cleared everything but the salt, wiped the wood down, and laid the judges' card in the middle where the overhead light would hit the print.
Perfect set. Clean, bright flavor, true to fruit.
Best in show consideration. Then I sat down across from him with my hands folded and waited for him to notice the table had turned into something.
He noticed. Gary reads a room even when he can't read a wife. He set his phone face-down, which for him is a white flag.
"All right," he said. "What is this."
"It's a card. The judges wrote it. You've never read it. I'm going to leave it there while we talk."
"Opal—"
"I'm going to tell you about a Saturday," I said, "and I need you to just listen, because I've got it in order, and if you jump in I'll lose my place."
He sat back and shut his mouth, I'll give him that. When Gary finally understands a thing is serious, he stops talking.
"Two Saturdays ago you were in Delacroix. You won second flight. Your last putt dropped around three o'clock, near as I can figure, because at three-oh-five I called to tell you I'd taken the blue ribbon. First place, out of forty-one. You remember what you said?"
"I said you're my girl," he said, low. "Said nobody makes it like you. I meant it, Opal."
"You did mean it. I'm not here to say you didn't." I turned the card a quarter inch so it faced him square.
"At three forty-one — thirty-six minutes after we hung up — you photographed your cup outside the clubhouse and sent it to Deke, Ron, Wade, and Buck.
With a caption. Second flight, boys. Read the greens like a book.
Ron sent a crown. Deke sent three beer mugs.
I read the whole thread. It ran a screen and a half. "
His jaw moved, but he didn't argue the facts. He knows better than to argue a fact I've already got in my hand.
"Sunday you drove home. Carried the cup in ahead of your clubs, put it on the mantel.
That night you called your mother and told her about it for ten minutes — she told me, Tuesday.
Used the word cured. Said you carried on like you'd cured something.
" I kept my voice level, because level was the whole point.
"Monday, Deke told Marlene. By Friday she had the scorecard, the trophy, the whole weekend, and handed it back to me in the baking aisle at the Piggly Wiggly like she was returning something I'd lost."
"Opal, I don't see what?—"
"I'm not done. You said you'd lose your place, so let me keep mine.
" I pressed my folded hands flat to the table.
"That's your Saturday. Here's mine. At three-oh-five I told one person I'd won.
That person was you. In the nine days since, do you know how many people have heard about my blue ribbon from your mouth? "
He didn't answer. He'd started to add it up — I could watch it land on him, the way you watch frost take a window.
"None," I said. "Deb told the whole county. Suzette knew before I did. A woman I've never met drove in from two counties over. It traveled everywhere the work's ever been tasted, Gary. It went through everybody but you. You're the one road it never took."
"I offered to text the boys." It came out weak, and he heard it come out weak.
"You offered to text the boys, like it was a chore I could hand you." I shook my head. "That's not it. If I've got to give you my own news and then stand over you while you pass it on, that's not you carrying it. That's me carrying it and using your hands."
He rubbed his neck. The sunburn had peeled to raw pink. "What do you want me to say?"
"I want you to answer one thing, and take your time, because I've taken mine.
" I leaned in. "Thirty-one years. Name me one.
One time in thirty-one years a piece of my news — a ribbon, the cookbook, an order, anything — got to your mother because you carried it.
Not because she asked me. Not because Deb told the county.
You. You walked in and said, my wife did this. Name me the one time."
The kitchen went quiet. The refrigerator kicked on and ran, and I let it run.
He looked at the card, then at the window over the sink where the blue jar used to sit.
He opened his mouth twice and shut it twice, and I watched a man go back through thirty-one years of his own life hunting one instance, patting every pocket he owns for a key he already knows isn't on him.
"There's the cookbook," he said finally. "I told people about the cookbook."
"Who."
"I—" He stopped. "People. At the store. It came up."
"It came up. That's not you carrying it, that's it drifting past you and you not stopping it. Name me one person you walked up to on purpose and said, my wife did the preserving section for the church cookbook and it sold out three times. One name."
"I—" He stopped again. "People."
"Name one."
He couldn't. I watched him fail to, and it didn't feel like winning — part of me had wanted him to come up with something, one real time, so I could be wrong, so the drawer could turn out to be an accident and not a law.
He gave me nothing. Not because he was hiding it.
Because it wasn't there. Thirty-one years, and the road had never once run the other way.
"Okay," he said, and his voice had gone somewhere I hadn't heard it go in a long time. Small. "Okay. I hear it. I do. I'll fix it — I'll call Mom right now, I'll?—"
"No." I said it hard enough that his hand stopped halfway to the phone.
"You said you wanted?—"
"I said I wanted you to answer a question.
I didn't say fix it in the next four minutes so you can go to bed square with me.
" His hand came back down. "That's the other thing you do, Gary.
Somebody hands you something hard and you want it closed fast. Off the table.
The win. You'd rather make one big loud call tonight than wake up tomorrow still knowing what you did.
" I shook my head. "You can't fix thirty years with one call any more than I can fix a bad set by stirring it after it's jarred.
It's set. What you did is set. A patch tonight is for you, not for me. "
He put his hand back on the table.
I stood up and took the card, held it a second — that little rectangle that said, in a stranger's handwriting, the thing my own husband had never once said out loud to another soul.
Best in show consideration. I didn't put it back in the drawer.
I set it in the middle of the clean table, face up, where he'd have to look at it over his eggs in the morning.
"There's a state qualifier," I said. "The fair association runs it every year.
First-place county winners can enter — you send your best jars, pay the fee, your name goes in the program, and a panel down in the capital judges you against the whole state.
" I stood over him with my hands quiet at my sides.
"I've qualified before. Six times, I think.
Six blue ribbons that would've let me in.
You want to know how many times I entered? "
He looked up.
"None. Every one of those years I told myself it wasn't worth the fee, or the drive, or the fuss.
That's what I told myself." I let it sit.
"You want the truth? I was waiting to be announced.
Waiting for somebody to look in my drawer and say, Opal, this is worth the capital.
Thirty years I waited for a man to hand me the microphone, and he never did, because it never once crossed his mind that the microphone was mine to hand out. "
"I never stopped you entering," he said, low. "I never once told you not to go."
"No, you never did. That's the trick of it, Gary.
You didn't have to. You don't have to nail a drawer shut if you can just make sure the woman never believes what's in it is worth carrying out.
You never said don't go. You just never, once, in thirty years, said go.
Never said, Opal, this is state-worthy, pack your jars, I'll drive.
Silence isn't nothing. Silence taught me exactly what I was worth, one unsaid word at a time, till I learned it so well I stopped needing you to say it.
I said it to myself. Not worth the fee. That was your voice by then, coming out of my own mouth. "
He didn't have anything for that, because there wasn't anything to have.
He sat with his hands open on the table like a man handed a bill he can't argue a line of, and I could tell the worst of it, for him, was that he'd rather I yelled.
Yelling he can work with. You weather it and it's over.
But I wasn't yelling. I was laying it out cold and in order, and there's no weathering the truth laid out cold. There's no door out of it tonight.
"Opal." He said my name like it hurt him. Maybe it did.
"The qualifier closes September first." I reached over and shut off the light over the table, so the card sat in the spill from the hall, still readable. "Watch what I do about it."
I went down the hall to bed. Behind me I heard the chair scrape, and then nothing — no phone, no footsteps. Just Gary alone in the half-dark kitchen with a judges' card he'd never read and a wife who'd finally quit waiting to be introduced.