Chapter 15
OPAL
Church-bazaar season comes in November, when the light goes low and gold in the afternoons and slants in through the front window a certain way. It comes through that window now and lands on the case.
The case sits under the window where Gary built it to sit, and in the low November afternoons the whole thing lights up — thirty-four ribbons, thirty-five now, the red state rosette in among them where I put it, all of it facing the room through the glass.
Twenty-two blues. A card behind each one.
The cookbook propped open to my page. When the light comes in low it turns the oak gold and the ribbons brighter than they've got any right to be, and I catch myself stopping in the doorway just to look, which I never once did at a drawer.
People come up the walk now and see it before they see us.
The meter reader stopped last week, looked in the window, and asked through the screen door was that a store, all those ribbons, and I laughed and said no, that's just mine, and he said, well, it looks like a store, ma'am, that's a lot of blue, and went on to the next house.
A lot of blue. Thirty years of it, out where a stranger reading a meter could count it from the yard.
That's all I'd ever wanted. Not a parade. Just the window uncovered.
The drawer's still there. I want that said plain, in case somebody thinks I'd have ripped it out by now and made a clean story of it.
I didn't. It's still the deep drawer by the stove, and it still sticks, and I still lean my hip in to shut it.
But it's empty now. Every ribbon came out and went behind the glass, and I never put another thing in that drawer, and I never will.
I leave it empty on purpose. Some mornings I open it just to see the nothing in it, the clean bottom of it, thirty years of dark with the ribbons finally out.
Then I lean my hip in and shut it, a catch, then a thud, and let it be what it is. I don't need it gone. I need it empty.
The mantel's shared now. We sat down and did it out loud, like the lease I said it'd be — his 1986 cup at one end, because I decided I wanted it up there, one man's good year allowed to be a good year, and my state rosette at the other, the two of them holding down opposite ends of a surface that used to be a fortress.
Nobody owns the center by default. We talk about it.
It's the strangest thing, how much peace there is in a surface you have to keep talking about instead of one somebody just holds.
The bazaar committee called on a Tuesday afternoon in November.
I was at the stove, elbow-deep in the last apple butter of the year, when the phone rang in the front room.
Gary got it, because he was home and closer to it.
I heard him say hello. And I stood there at the stove with the spoon in my hand and felt the old brace come up in me, automatic, thirty years deep — the wait, the flinch, the readiness for him to take a call about me and make it about the room, about his charm, about anything but handing it straight across.
"This is Gary," I heard him say. A pause.
"Uh-huh. The bazaar, sure." A pause. "You want to feature—" and I braced harder, because here it came, the place he used to step in — oh, you want the jam queen, let me tell you about my wife — the place my news went into him and came back out wearing his voice.
He didn't do it.
"You want Opal," he said. And then, "Hold on." And I heard him carry the phone — actually carry it, the cord stretching, his footsteps coming down the hall to the kitchen — and he held it out to me across the steam, receiver in his hand, and said:
"It's your news, hon. Your phone call."
That's all he said. He didn't tell me what they wanted.
Didn't tell them about me first. Didn't translate it or dress it up or wedge himself into the middle of it.
He just carried the phone to the person the call was about and put it in her hand and stepped back, and stood there in the kitchen doorway with his hands empty and let the call be mine.
I took it. Wiped my hand on my apron and took the phone, and it was Carol from the bazaar committee, and she wanted to feature me — a table of my own at the front of the hall, my name on the sign, a little card telling folks about the state ribbon.
She'd heard about the state ribbon. Of course she had.
It had traveled, the way everything travels now, out through the county on its own legs.
Somebody's cousin had been at the state fair.
Somebody's aunt read the program. Louise had told the whole prayer circle, I found out later — Louise, who'd gotten a jar in the mail with a copy of a judges' card and a note in her son's hand.
She'd carried it straight to church, set it on the table by the coffee, and told anybody who'd stand still.
My news had grown legs and a set of wheels, and none of it ran through a drawer anymore.
"I'd be glad to," I said, and I gave her my answer myself, my own dates, my own terms, my own name for the sign. Opal Deene. The whole thing.
Gary went back to the front room while I talked.
I could see him through the doorway, standing at the case in the low gold light, looking at the ribbons, not touching them.
Just looking. His cup was on the mantel now, at its agreed end.
His hands were empty. He'd handed me my own phone call and walked away from it — put a thing in my hand, then took his hands away.
I finished with Carol and hung up. Then I went back to the stove, because the apple butter doesn't care about any of it, and the jars were cooling on the towel where I'd set them.
I pressed my thumb to the first lid, checking, the old habit, the thing my hands do when I need to know a thing held.
And under my thumb the seal drew down and popped — that small clean sound, the lid pulling tight, the jar doing what I'd asked of it.
One good seal. I stood there and felt it go under my thumb and let it be everything at once — the sound, the win, the long way round to it.
The label gun was by the sink where it's always been.
I picked it up. Ran a label for the apple butter — I label everything again now, every batch, every jar, I don't leave a single one blank — set it in the gun and ran it out and pressed it to the shoulder of the warm glass, and set it straight with my thumbnail, corner to corner, dead level.
My name went on the first line. In the largest type. Not initials tucked small in a corner. Not O.D. folded down to two letters so it wouldn't take up room. Opal Deene, first line, biggest print, where anybody who ever picked up the jar would read it before they read another word.
No little bow at the end of it. No flourish.
I don't dress it up. The drawer's still in the wall and it still sticks, and the mark of all those years is still on both of us, plain, not painted over — I can see it on him some evenings, the flinch he catches now instead of feeding, and he can see it on me, the way I still brace for half a second when a phone rings about my own life.
The scar's right there. We just don't live in it anymore.
In the front room Gary set the phone back in its cradle and stood a moment at the case in the low gold light, hands in his pockets, then came to the kitchen doorway and watched me press the label.
He didn't say it was straight. Didn't tell me it looked good.
He'd learned that much — that some things you just let a woman do, and keep your praise in your pocket where it can't crowd her.
"Carol got you sorted?" was all he asked.
"She did," I said. "November eighth. My table. My sign."
"Good," he said, and went to put the coffee on, because it was that time of the afternoon, and a marriage is mostly that time of the afternoon, over and over, for as long as you're lucky enough to get it.
I pressed the label flat and turned the jar so the name faced out, and set it on the shelf in the row with the others, all of them named, all of them mine, and wiped my hands on my apron and went to stir the last of the batch before it caught.
THE END
Thank you so much for reading - Please continue to give me your feedback in the form of reviews - I read one that told me to stop saying “I don’t want you to fix it just sit in it and be uncomfortable.
” The meaning behind these words are closer to I want you to realize how this is affecting me - but I have chosen other words and I hope they work out.
My stories are not meant to be angsty or plot heavy - they are about the inside of a relationship and finding one another, working things through and out.
If you want crazy betrayal stories - you will be disappointed every time from me.
No one is getting divorced, no one is cheating - sorry. Life is sad enough.
If this was your “jam” you might also like…
THE ANNIVERSARY HE GOLFED THROUGH
Ellen Morrow set the table for two.
Her grandmother’s ivory cloth. Her mother’s water glasses. The roast Jack loved. Two candles waiting to be lit. The green dress he once told her was her color.
Thirty years of marriage deserved a marked day.
Jack promised he would be home by four.
At 8:04, he called from the nineteenth hole.
The course had been slow. The group had a chance to play the good course in the morning. He was thinking he would stay over and come home Sunday.
Was that okay?
Ellen said yes.
Then she sat alone at the anniversary table until both candles burned out.
Two hours and eleven minutes.
Jack comes home ready to fix it. A better dinner. A private room. Roses. A toast. A whole evening done right.
But Ellen does not want a production.
She wanted him in the chair.
Because this was never only about golf.
It was the late cards he turned into jokes. The birthdays moved around quota dinners. The anniversaries pushed to better weekends. The quiet way Ellen’s marked days always became the ones that gave.
For thirty years, Jack loved her with filled gas tanks, salted steps, warm coffee, and a car already running on cold mornings.
And for thirty years, he never noticed what it cost her to be the wife who always said yes.
Now Ellen stops moving.
She stops drawing stars on the calendar.
She opens the shoebox of late cards.
She takes her camera down from the closet shelf where it has waited nine years.
And she asks Jack for one thing he cannot buy, book, fix, or perform.
Be home on December twenty-first.
No speech. No reservation. No flowers.
Just the darkest night of the year, two candles, and the chair across from hers.
Because love is not asking whether it is okay after you have already decided.
Sometimes love is losing the deposit.
Moving your own calendar.
Standing in the room without reaching for applause.
And learning that your wife’s easy yes was never free.
The Wife He Forgot
She wakes up on her birthday to an empty house.
No card. No message. No flowers. Just his coffee mug in the sink and the echo of a door that closed before she opened her eyes.
Nina calls him at ten. He answers distracted — voices in the background, papers shuffling. He doesn't mention the date. She doesn't remind him.
She waits until dinner. Nothing.
So she packs a weekend bag. Drives to a hotel fifteen minutes away. Turns off her phone. And sits in a silence she chose — instead of the one she'd been living inside for years.
When Ian comes home to a dark house, he panics. Not because he remembers. Because she's gone and he doesn't know why.
He has to reconstruct what he missed. The texts she sent that he never answered.
The dinners she planned that he canceled.
The anniversaries she celebrated alone. A decade of evidence that he was physically present and emotionally missing — all of it documented in her handwriting on a family calendar he never once read.
The birthday wasn't the breaking point. It was the last entry in a pattern she'd been tracking long before she knew she was keeping score.