Chapter 6
GARY
Ididn't sleep much after the card night. A man tells himself he's a good husband for thirty-one years, and then his wife lays a timeline out on the kitchen table like a prosecutor, and the worst of it is he can't find one line to call a lie.
So I did the thing she'd all but dared me to, though not the way she'd have figured. I didn't call Mom. I went back through my own phone.
Sat in the truck in the equipment lot on my lunch and scrolled. Nine days, she'd said. I found Suzette's order in my memory — Opal telling me at supper, doubled, hold a case, her whole fall — marked that day one, and read forward through everything I'd sent since.
It was worse than I thought, and I'd thought it was bad.
Day two, I'd texted the boys about Wade's used boat — a twenty-footer he got cheap off a fella in Millbrook.
Three messages, one of them a photo Wade forwarded me, because a good deal on a boat is news, apparently.
Day four, my nephew Cody scored a touchdown in a scrimmage — a scrimmage, not even a real game — and I'd sent that to Mom and my sister and the boys with two exclamation points.
Day six I photographed a coupon. A coupon.
Buy-one-get-one on ribeyes at the Cattleman's, off to Deke with lunch on you is now lunch on nobody.
A boat that wasn't mine. A touchdown that wasn't mine. A coupon.
And nowhere in those nine days, in all those little bulletins flying out of my thumbs, was there one word about my own wife doubling the biggest order she'd ever had.
Her whole fall, she'd said. I'd heard it.
Said that's real good money. Then set it down in the same place I set all her news and picked up a coupon and sent that instead.
I put the phone in the cup holder and sat there with the AC running, sick in a way that had nothing to do with the truck-stop breakfast.
I didn't go home to fix it that night — I'd learned at least that much, that you don't patch this with a phone call over eggs. I drove out the county road to Mom's.
She was on the porch. Mom's always on the porch in the evening, May to October, same chair, the paper folded on her knee whether she's reading it or not. She's watched my truck come up that drive for fifty-seven years.
"Well," she said, when I came up the steps. "You've got a face on you."
I sat down in the other chair, the one that was Dad's. I don't usually sit in Dad's chair.
"Mom," I said. "I need to tell you some things about Opal, and I need you to let me get through them."
She set the paper aside. Eighty-one, and she can still go still as a hawk. "All right."
"Opal took the blue at the county fair this year. Strawberry. First place, out of forty-one." I made myself keep going. "Judges wrote her a card. Best in show consideration, it says. That doesn't happen. Deb Frawley told me it hardly ever happens."
Mom didn't say anything. Waited.
"And it's not just this year. She's got a drawer full — thirty years of ribbons, blues, most of them.
I started to count them the other night and couldn't finish.
" My throat did the thing it had done in the kitchen.
"There's a state qualifier she's earned six times over and never once entered.
That church cookbook she did the preserving section for — it sold out and they printed it again, three printings.
And the gift shop just doubled her standing order for the fall.
Doubled it. Said Opal's jars are the only thing the tourists want. "
I ran out of air. Mom sat there in the porch light with her hands folded on the arms of the chair.
"I'm telling you all this because you didn't know any of it.
And the reason you didn't know is me. You've been asking me about my golf for forty years and I've handed it right over, and every August you'd ask about Opal's canning and I'd say fine and steer us back to me.
She didn't hide from you. I hid her. I don't fully understand why I did it, Mom, but I did, and I'm sitting here telling you the whole record because somebody in this family besides me ought to carry it. "
I'd braced for her to be surprised — her face going soft with it, that little shock, and then maybe proud of Opal, which would've been something to bring home.
She wasn't surprised. That's the thing that took the last leg out from under me.
She looked at me the way you look at a boy who's finally caught up to something you've known so long you'd quit expecting him to.
"Gary," she said. "I know about the cookbook.
I know about the gift shop. I didn't know about this year's ribbon, and I'm glad to hear it, and I'll tell you I'm not one bit surprised.
" She reached over and patted my knee, once, dry and light.
"I stopped asking you about Opal a long time ago, honey.
Fifteen years, more. Every time I asked, you'd get a look and go short and have us back on your golf inside a minute.
I could set a clock by it. So I quit asking you. "
"You—"
"I ask her," Mom said. "When you're not in the room.
Get her on the phone Tuesdays, or catch her in the kitchen at Thanksgiving after you've gone to watch the game, and I say, Opal, what've you been making, what've you won.
And she tells me. Has for years." She looked out at the yard going blue.
"I know more about your wife's ribbons than you do, son.
Have for a long time. I just learned to get it from the source, because the source was the only place it ran clean. "
"You could've made me hear it," I said. "You're my mother. You could've sat me down."
"I tried, the first few years." No heat in it.
"You'd get that look. Same one your father got when somebody bragged on a man that wasn't him.
I know that look, Gary. I was married to it forty-one years.
Wasn't about to spend my old age fighting it in my son too.
" She folded her hands. "So I made my peace.
Got your wife the quiet way and let you have your golf, and told myself a woman like Opal didn't need me stirring her marriage for her.
Maybe I was wrong to leave it. I've wondered.
But you don't teach a grown man to see. Either something opens his eyes or nothing does. "
"Something opened them," I said.
"I can see that. Question's whether they stay open." She looked at me steady. "They've got a way of drifting shut again, eyes. Especially on a man that's been comfortable in the dark a long time."
I sat in my dead father's chair and couldn't think of one thing to say.
There was nowhere to take it. Every hard conversation I've ever had, I've had an exit — a joke, a subject, some story about myself to steer us into.
I went hunting for it out of pure habit, my mind casting around for the golf, the sale, anything, and it wasn't there.
My own mother had gone around me for fifteen years to reach my wife, and done it so quiet I'd never once felt the traffic rerouting past my own front door.
"How'd she seem," I said. "When she told you. All those years. Was she — was she all right?"
Mom looked at me a long moment, like she was deciding how much I could stand in one night.
"She seemed like a woman who'd made her peace with a small life," she said.
"Content, mostly. Proud of her work, in that quiet way.
And every so often, when she'd tell me a thing she'd won, there'd be half a second where she'd wait — just a beat — like she was listening for whether it landed anywhere.
Then she'd go on. I don't think she knew she did it.
I noticed because I'm old and I watch." She folded her hands again.
"A woman shouldn't have to make her peace with a small life at fifty, Gary, when her life was never small.
It just got kept in a drawer by somebody who had the say. "
"Why didn't you say something," I said. It came out like a boy's question.
"Would you have heard it?" Not unkind. Just true.
"You're hearing it tonight because Opal made you hear it.
I could've talked till I was blue." She picked the paper back up, which is how she tells you the porch part's done.
"Go home, Gary. Don't fix it on the drive.
Whatever you're about to do tonight to feel better — don't. This isn't a thing you feel better about.
It's a thing you change, and changing takes longer than a drive home. "
I went down the steps. At the truck I looked back.
She was already reading, or pretending to, the porch light yellow on her white hair.
And I understood she'd been holding a truth about my marriage in her lap for fifteen years, waiting on that chair for the day I'd finally drive out and ask to hold it too.
I got in and didn't turn the radio on. Drove the whole county road home in the dark with the windows down, and for once in my life I didn't have one thing to say to anybody about anybody.