Chapter 3
OPAL
Ididn't fight about it, which surprised me. I'm not a woman who lets a thing lie — ask my route kids, ask the man who tried to sell me a warranty on a freezer that already worked. But something had gone quiet in me that I didn't have a name for, and quiet was what came out.
Gary didn't notice a thing, which was fair, since I gave him nothing to notice.
He got up when I got home, ate the eggs I put down, told me about the combine deal and about a man who'd bought a used baler sight unseen and regretted it.
Kissed my head. Went to work. He wasn't being cruel.
He was being exactly the man he'd always been — I'd been the one to change the temperature, and he couldn't feel the drop because he runs warm.
Wednesday I made blackberry. The berries had come in thick along the fence by the reservoir road, and I'd picked them myself with a coffee can on my belt, the way my grandmother did, near black with sun.
Good fruit. I cooked it down slow and it set like a dream, that clean sharp seedy set people drive out of their way for.
Eleven half-pints. I scalded the jars, wiped the rims, seated the lids, and stood there listening to the seals pop as they cooled, all eleven, one after another.
And then I did a thing I couldn't have explained to anybody. I left them bare.
The label gun was right there by the sink where it lives.
I looked at it. I thought about the little white rectangle, Blackberry in my careful print, the date, my initials down in the corner — O.D.
And I couldn't make my hand pick it up. It felt like a lie somehow, putting my name on a thing to send it out into a house where my name didn't travel anyway.
If a jar with my initials on it could sit in this county thirty years and never once come out of my mother-in-law's mouth as a sentence, then what was the label even for? Who was it telling?
I lined the eleven bare jars up on the pantry shelf next to the labeled ones, dark and shining and nameless, and shut the door on them.
Gary opened it Thursday looking for the peanut butter. "Hon, you got a bunch of blackberry back here with no tags. That the new batch?"
"That's the new batch."
"You run out of labels?"
"No," I said, and left it there, and watched him not ask the second question — Gary's never in his life asked the second question when the first one got a flat answer.
He found his peanut butter and shut the pantry and went on with his morning.
It never crossed his mind that a woman who's dated and named every jar in this house for thirty years might be saying something with eleven blank ones.
He'd have had to be curious about me to hear it, and he wasn't, and never had been.
I stood there at the counter finally seeing that plain.
So I stopped feeding him news. I did it on purpose.
For years I'd handed Gary the little bulletins of my days across the supper table — Suzette wants a bigger order, the cookbook committee wants me back, the church sold out again — and it had always felt like the natural motion of a marriage, the two of you pooling your days.
But I'd started watching what happened to those bulletins after I handed them over.
Nothing. They went into Gary and stopped there, the way a coin goes down a well.
So I quit dropping coins, just to see what would travel if I gave him nothing to carry.
Nothing traveled. I got that answer fast.
Wednesday night I said nothing about the blackberry setting like a dream.
Thursday I said nothing about the church calling to ask me back for the cookbook's fourth printing.
I sat across from him with my little bulletins held behind my teeth and watched him fill the quiet with a story about a man who'd traded a tractor and cried about it, and it came to me that the quiet between us had never once been mutual.
I'd been feeding it from my side for thirty years.
He'd just been talking over the top of the meal, and I'd been calling that a marriage.
Friday Suzette called from the gift shop. I took it out on the porch, phone tucked to my ear, snapping the ends off a colander of green beans more out of habit than need.
"Opal, I'm just going to say it," she said. "I want to double the fall order."
The bean stopped halfway to the bowl. "Double."
"Peach cleaned me out by the Fourth. The tourists this year, I swear, they buy your stuff like it's the only thing on the shelf.
Had a woman drive back from two counties over because she couldn't find your blackberry anyplace else.
" She laughed. "So — double the standing order, and set me a case of the strawberry aside before it walks out the door. I heard you took the fair."
"You heard that?"
"Course I did. Deb Frawley tells anybody who'll hold still. First out of forty-one, she said." Her voice went soft and pleased. "Told her I wasn't one bit surprised."
So it could travel. It traveled through Deb, through Suzette, through the woman who chased my blackberry down a state road from two counties over. Everyone but the man sleeping next to me.
I sat on the porch a long while after we hung up, beans forgotten in the bowl, the evening coming down soft over the yard.
Double the order. That was real money and real standing, the gift shop hanging its whole fall on my jars, and there was exactly one person in the world I was supposed to want to tell first, one face I was supposed to want to watch light up.
I told him at supper, plain, no music around it, so I could watch it clean.
"Suzette doubled the fall order," I said. "Wants a case of strawberry held back before it sells. Called it her whole fall."
Gary looked up. "Yeah? That's good money, hon.
That's real good." He smiled, and it was a true smile — and then his phone lit up on the table between us and his eyes went to it the way water finds downhill.
"Combine finally closed. Look at that. Tuesday, like I said.
" He turned the screen to me: a green machine with a red SOLD sticker on the glass.
"Deke bet me it'd fall through. Owes me lunch again. Man's gonna go broke feeding me."
"Congratulations," I said.
He was already thumbing something to the boys, a little laugh going under his breath at whatever he'd written.
I watched him do it. Watched the machinery turn over easy, the way it always turned over — a combine going out to five phones while my whole fall just sat there in the air over the pork chops and went nowhere.
He wasn't hiding my news. Hiding takes effort, and there was no effort in it.
He'd just set it down where he sets everything of mine, in the still water, and reached past it for the thing that would move.
I did the dishes with the dark window in front of me, and somewhere over the second plate the quiet in me went cold and hard and turned into something I could use.
I'd stop wondering whether he did it. I knew he did it.
What I didn't know was how far it went — how deep the well ran, how many years and how many bulletins had gone down it.
So I'd find out. Stop guessing at the size of the thing and start counting it, the way I count seals, the way I count jars.
I dried my hands on the towel over the drawer where thirty years of ribbons lay in the dark.
Nine days, I told myself. I'd hand him one more piece of news, a true one, and then wait, and count every single thing that came out of his mouth in the meantime that wasn't it.
Then I'd know the exact size of what I'd married.
I hung the towel straight. Behind the pantry door the eleven bare jars sat shining in the dark, waiting on names I hadn't given them, and for the first time all week that felt less like grief than the start of a case.