Chapter 13
OPAL
The capital's two hours off, and we drove it with the boxes belted into the back seat like children.
Gary drove. I held the entry paperwork in my lap and watched the corn go by, and neither of us said much, which was its own kind of easy.
Every few miles he'd check the mirror — not on the traffic, on the boxes, like he was making sure they were still there — and I let him.
A month ago I'd have read it as fuss. Now I read it as a man learning my jars were worth a look.
We stopped once for gas. While it pumped he came around and snugged the belts across the boxes, tested them with two fingers, got back in smelling of cold air and gasoline. "Forty more," he said, and I said I knew, and we drove the forty with the radio low.
The state fairgrounds swallow the county fair whole and then some — a midway you can't see the end of, barns the size of churches, a Ferris wheel turning slow against a flat gray sky.
The exhibition building's a long low hall of glass and steel.
I stood in the doorway a minute and had to catch my breath, because the preserves table alone ran three times the length of our whole county hall, jars going off from me in rows till they blurred.
Hundreds of them. Every one somebody's best. I'd told myself the whole drive down that it was just canning, same as my kitchen, same sheet off the same spoon.
Standing in that doorway I knew it was that and also it wasn't, and I let both be true.
I checked my jars in myself. My hands. Set the entry number in its holder — same closed system as county, no names on the judges' side, only the number, so the jam stands on the jam.
Ran my thumb over the lid of the first jar out of habit, checking a seal that didn't need checking, then made myself let go of the table and walk away, because the judging was closed now and there was nothing left of it in my hands.
Gary had a booth. Not for the competition — the fair rents selling space to entrants, and I'd taken a little corner of it years ago and never once worked it hard, because working it hard meant standing behind my own name all day, and I hadn't been ready.
This year I was. And Gary worked it like he'd worked the harvest festival, only more so, because now there were strangers by the thousands and not one of them knew him as anything but the man saying a sentence about his wife.
I heard him do it while I set out my display. A couple stopped at the strawberry.
"My wife made these," Gary said. "She's got six jars in the judging right now, back in the hall.
Best preserver in our county — you can go read her entry, she's in the program.
" He had the program. Bought two and left one open on the booth to the preserves page, and there was my name in the list, printed — Opal Deene, between a Cousins and a Delgado, plain as anybody's. "Right there. Opal Deene. That's her."
The woman read it, then looked at me across the booth. "You're in the program?" she said, like it was a wonder, and I said, "I am," and it was the first time in my life I'd said those three words, and they tasted like well water.
We sold. Steady work, the good kind, the kind that keeps your hands busy while your stomach ties itself in knots over a judging you can't touch.
A schoolteacher from the capital bought four jars and asked how I got the strawberry to hold its color.
I told her the truth — you don't cook the color out if you don't chase the thermometer — and she wrote it on the back of her hand with a pen from her purse.
A man in a feed cap tried the blackberry off the tasting spoon, went quiet, bought six, and said his late wife used to make it like that.
I didn't know what to say to that. I just wrapped his jars slow and careful and let him stand there a minute in whatever he was standing in.
Gary saw it too. He didn't fill the man's quiet with talk.
Just bagged the jars and said, soft, "She'd have liked these, then," and the man nodded and went off into the crowd holding the bag against his chest.
Between customers I watched the doors of the exhibition hall, because the results posted at four, and I'd promised myself I wouldn't hover, and I didn't. I let Gary hover.
He couldn't stand it. Kept finding reasons to walk past the hall, and at ten to four he gave up pretending and just stood in the doorway of it with his hat in his hands.
I let him. I stayed at the booth, sold a jar of blackberry to a man from three states over, and made my own change.
At quarter to he couldn't take it another second. Took his hat off, put it back on, took it off. "I'm going over," he said. "I'll come straight back. You want to come?"
"No," I said. "I'll be here. Somebody's got to mind the booth."
That was half of it. The other half was I couldn't make my legs walk over there and read a board with my own name on it in front of a crowd.
Thirty years of keeping it in a drawer doesn't come off you all at once.
I could enter under my whole name. I could put it on the sign.
But standing shoulder to shoulder with strangers to watch a judge's verdict land — that I still had to do the long way, through Gary, one more time, and I let myself have that one last time.
He went. I sold two jars of peach butter to a woman with a stroller and made her change and told her to keep it out of the heat, and the whole while my ears were pointed across the midway like a dog's.
Gary came back across the midway at four with his face doing something complicated. He wasn't running. That told me it wasn't first, and I felt the small drop of it, I won't pretend I didn't. But he wasn't dragging either.
He walked up and stopped in front of the table, and I watched him choose, right then, not to make me guess, not to string it out for a beat of drama the way the old Gary would've, milking the reveal. He just gave it to me straight, which was its own small mercy.
"Second," he said, when he got close. "You took second in the state, Opal. Out of the whole state. Red rosette." He held it out — they'd given him the rosette to bring me, a deep red thing with long tails, bigger than any county blue. "And there's a card. The judge wrote you a card."
I took the card before the rosette. Read it standing in the sawdust with the midway screaming behind me.
A whisker from gold. Enter again.
I read it three times, the way I'd read the county card, the way I read anything that tells the truth about my hands.
A whisker from gold. Second in the state, first time I'd ever let the state see my name.
Some woman I've never met took the gold, and good for her, and I'll find out who and learn what she did that I didn't, because enter again is the truest thing a judge ever handed me and I mean to follow it.
It didn't gut me, though I'd braced for it to, and it took me a minute to understand why.
The win I'd come for wasn't on the judges' card.
The win I'd come for was the program with my name in it, and the entry table where I set my own jars down under my own whole name, and the strangers reading Opal Deene off a printed page between a Cousins and a Delgado.
I'd entered. I'd appeared. I'd let my work be judged in the open under the name I chose, no drawer, no crown, no man's mouth in between.
That was the gold. Second place was just the score, and the score, for once in my marriage, was the smaller thing.
Gary held the rosette while I held the card, and he didn't say one thing about golf, or about a whisker being nothing, or about how she should've had first — none of the noise a man makes to fill a woman's disappointment when he thinks she's disappointed.
He just stood there and let it be what it was.
"Second in the state," he said again, quiet, like he was setting it somewhere it would stay. "First time out. Opal. Do you know what that is?"
"I know what it is," I said.
We worked the booth till it closed, and it was good work, and I sold down to almost nothing, which meant less to pack and more to count, and Gary carried the empty boxes to the truck without being asked.
Twice more before closing a customer picked up a jar and he said it — the flat true sentence, my wife made these, she took second in the state today — present tense now, a fact with a date on it, and each time I heard him say it, something in me settled another notch.
We got a motel by the interstate, the kind with a sign half burned out and a pool nobody swims in.
Ate fair food out of paper trays sitting on the bed — a corn dog for him, a funnel cake we split, too much of it, powdered sugar getting everywhere the way it does.
He stood the red rosette against the lamp on the nightstand where we could both see it, propped the card against the base.
A whisker from gold. Enter again. We didn't talk about next year, not out loud, but the card was doing the talking, and we both read it more than once.
The whole night the fair lights came through the thin curtain in slow colors, red and gold and green, wheeling across the ceiling from the Ferris wheel two lots over.
What happened between us that night is ours, and it stays behind the door.
But I'll say this much: it was the first time in a long while it felt like two people who'd chosen each other on purpose, and not two people who'd just never left.
It had a door on it, and we were both inside it, and that was the difference.
He'd earned his way back into the room the slow way, box by box and sentence by sentence, and I'd earned my way out of the drawer the same slow way.
We met in a cheap motel with fair light on the ceiling closer to equals than we'd ever been.
We drove home the next morning with the corn going by the other direction.
I didn't box the rosette. Didn't wrap it in a towel and file it.
I stood it up on the dashboard, red and long-tailed, propped where the sun came through the windshield and the whole county could've seen it if the whole county had been looking, and it rode there the full two hours, catching the light, my name's worth of red out where the world could read it, all the way home.