Chapter 8
GARY
Ifinally made myself finish the count.
Did it on a Saturday morning while Opal was out at the Hollis stand for the last of the fall berries. Took every ribbon out of that drawer, laid them across the whole kitchen table in rows, counted them slow, and made myself keep going past nineteen this time even when my chest went tight.
Thirty-four ribbons. Twenty-two of them blue.
Under the ribbons were the cards, the little judges' cards, in her hand and in strangers' hands.
And under the cards, folded flat at the bottom of the drawer where I'd never once looked, was the church cookbook.
Blessings from the Kitchen, with a drawing of a pie on the front.
Third printing, it said inside the cover, small, the way a thing says something it's proud of but won't shout.
I turned to the preserving section. Six pages.
Her name at the top — Preserving section by Opal Deene.
Notes penciled in the margins in her hand, corrections for a next printing that maybe never got made, a little star by the strawberry where she'd written use less pectin, trust the sheet.
I sat down at my own kitchen table in front of thirty-four ribbons and a cookbook with my wife's name in it.
It was like walking through a house you've lived in for years and finding a whole wing you never knew was there.
Furnished. Lived in. Warm. And me the only one in the family who'd never had a key, because I'd never once tried the door.
I thought about the mantel in the front room. Six inches of golf trophies and the big one in the middle. I'd fussed over that mantel forty years — knew the exact spacing. And ten feet away, in a drawer that stuck, sat thirty years of a better athlete than me, filed in the dark next to the spatulas.
I'm not a man who reads a lot into things. But I sat there long enough to do the arithmetic I'd been ducking, and it was ugly, and it was mine.
I couldn't fix thirty years — Mom was right about that. But I could build something, and building's a thing I actually know how to do, because my father taught me before he decided I was only worth talking to the one year I won.
His tools were still in the garage. I'd never gotten rid of them.
The good hand plane, the chisels in their roll, the miter box gone gray, the little brass level that still reads true.
Hadn't touched them since he passed. I picked up the plane, and the tote was rubbed smooth on the right side where his thumb used to ride, and I set my hand where his had been, and it was like shaking hands with him across something I couldn't name.
He never taught me much with words. He taught me with these, back when I was small enough to be a project instead of a disappointment.
I cleared the bench — golf junk, oil rags — and laid his tools out the way he used to, square to the edge, and started building a case.
Glass front. That was the whole point, and I knew it without Opal saying so.
Not a drawer. Not a shadow box for one loud ribbon.
A proper glass-front case, oak, deep enough for the cards to stand behind the ribbons, tall enough for all thirty-four with room to grow.
I ripped the stock down and planed the edges true with my father's plane, and the shavings came up in curls the way they did when I was twelve, that clean smell, and somewhere in the second evening my hands started remembering things my head had let go.
Took me a week of nights. I mitered the corners in Dad's miter box, cut the rabbet for the glass, sanded and oiled the oak till the grain came up like it was lit from inside.
Drove to the glass shop myself for the front and set it in with little points, the way you're supposed to.
I could've bought a case — there's a store two towns over sells them, glass-front, forty minutes and a credit card and I'd have had one in the truck by lunch.
Thought about it, honestly, the same lazy way I'd thought a shadow box would do.
But a bought case is just a bought case.
It says a man spent money. It doesn't say a man spent nights, and nights were what I owed her — the ones she spent alone in a hot kitchen while I slept.
My father would've run his thumb along the miters and grunted, which was the highest thing he ever gave out, and I built it like I was trying to earn the grunt.
When it was done I carried it into the front room, and I didn't arrange one single ribbon in it.
That part was hers. I'd figured out that much. I set the empty case on the low table under the front window, where the morning light comes in, right in the sightline of the mantel so you couldn't look at my trophies without the case being in it too, and called Opal in, and handed her the drawer.
"It's yours to fill," I said. "I built the box. I'm not touching how they go in it. You put them where you want."
She stood in the doorway a long time looking at it.
She didn't say it was nice. She'd said the shadow box was nice, and I'd learned by then that nice out of Opal is the sound of a thing missing the mark.
This time she didn't say nice. She knelt down by the case and opened the drawer she'd carried in and started laying the ribbons out on the rug in some order only she knew — not by color, not by year, by something else, some weather of her own.
I stood back and kept my hands to myself and let her build her own wing of the house right there on the floor where I could watch.
Took her the whole evening. I brought her a cup of tea partway through and set it down beside her without a word and backed off, because I'd worked out by then that the help she wanted from me was the kind that stayed out of the way.
She'd pick up a ribbon, hold it a second, set it in a spot, move it a half inch.
Some she held longer than others. There was one, an old red gone nearly pink, that she held a long time before she found its place, and I didn't ask, because it wasn't mine to ask about.
When she stood up, thirty-four ribbons faced the room through the glass, twenty-two of them blue, the cards standing behind them so you could read what the judges said, the cookbook propped open in the bottom corner to the page with her name.
It caught the last of the light. Made the mantel look like what it was — one man's good year, repeated.
There was one more thing, and I did it that same night, on purpose, while I still had the nerve up.
I took the 1986 cup down off the mantel.
That cup is the middle of the mantel. It's the middle of a lot of things I hadn't looked at square yet.
My hand didn't want to lift it. But I lifted it and carried it back to the den myself and set it on the shelf by the recliner where I read the equipment catalogs, and left the middle of the mantel with a clean bright rectangle in the dust where forty years of the same cup had sat.
Opal watched me do it and didn't say anything. But when I came back through she'd moved the case an inch left, into the exact center of the window light, taking the space the cup used to own, and I understood the inch and let her have it.
The Monday men are a thing I do — coffee at the diner, six or seven of us, Deke and Ron and the rest, every Monday before the week eats us. They notice a haircut. They'd for sure notice a trophy.
"Somebody said your golf cup came off the mantel," Deke said, before I'd even sat down. Ron looked up from his eggs. Small county. Word gets around — which is the whole entire problem, isn't it. Word gets around about everything but the right things.
I could've made it a joke. Stood there over the vinyl booth with the exit right there, the easy line — ran out of room, boys, gotta make space for the new stuff — and it would've landed, and they'd have laughed, and I'd have sat down clean.
I didn't take it.
"Moved it to the den," I said. "My wife's got thirty years of blue ribbons that spent that whole time in a drawer because I hogged the mantel.
Twenty-two firsts. A state qualifier. A cookbook.
Never told a soul, including my own mother, because somewhere in my head I decided there was only so much shelf in a house and it was mine.
" I heard my voice go rough and kept it going anyway.
"So the cup's in the den now, and Opal's ribbons are in the front window where the mantel used to run the room. That's why it moved."
Nobody laughed, because I hadn't given them a joke to laugh at.
Nobody said a thing at all for a second, and it was a long second, the kind of quiet that costs a man something across a table full of men he's known thirty years.
Deke turned his coffee cup in its saucer.
Ron looked at me like he was seeing a different fella in my chair.
Then Deke said, quiet, "Marlene's got a drawer like that. Blue ribbons. Sewing." He didn't look up when he said it. "Never thought about it."
"Yeah," I said, and sat down. "Neither did I. For forty years."
Ron cleared his throat. "My Debra plays the organ at the Methodist. Thirty years. Couldn't tell you the last time I said out loud she was any good at it." He turned his cup. "Huh."
Nobody had a joke. Six men in a diner booth, each one running his own arithmetic on his own wife's drawer, and it was the quietest that table's been in the twenty years I've sat at it.
Then Wade waved the waitress over for more coffee and somebody said something about the ballgame, and it moved on, the way a diner moves on.
But I'd said it out loud in the one room where saying it cost the most, and let the quiet after it land on me instead of laughing my way out from under it.
And when I drove home, the front window of my house had a case in it full of my wife's whole life, catching the morning, where anybody coming up the walk would see it before they ever saw me.