Chapter 7
OPAL
The dealership throws its dealer dinner the third week of August, same as every August — a hundred people in the banquet room at the Elks, rubber chicken, a cash bar, a slideshow of the year's numbers.
I've been to twenty-some of them. Wives at the round tables, husbands working the room, a man from the manufacturer handing out plaques. I always wear the blue dress.
Gary had been different for a week by then.
Careful with me, in a way that didn't sit natural on him, like a big man crossing a room full of breakables.
He'd done the supper dishes twice without being asked.
He'd read the judges' card. I knew because I found it moved — set square in the middle of the table where I'd left it, but turned a different way, the way a thing gets turned by a man who picked it up, read it, and set it back trying to make it look untouched.
He hadn't mentioned his mother's porch. I didn't ask.
I was still counting, still watching, still waiting to see what a changed Gary did with his hands and not just his careful face.
At the dinner he was in his element. Can't help it, and I don't fully hold it against him — he's the man everybody's glad to see, the one whose table laughs loudest, and there's a version of me that married him for exactly that warmth.
He worked the room between the salad and the chicken while I sat with Marlene and the other wives and let the noise wash over me.
Then the manufacturer's man finished the plaques, and there came that loose open minute before dessert when anybody with a glass and a little nerve can stand up and say a thing, and Gary stood up.
He tapped his water glass with a fork, and the room quieted the way rooms quiet for Gary, easy, glad to.
"Before we get to the pie," he said, "I want to brag on somebody, and it's not me for once.
" A laugh — he keeps their laugh in his pocket.
"Some of you know my wife, Opal. Well, this woman just went and won the whole county fair.
Blue ribbon. Her strawberry jam beat forty other jams." He looked over at me across the room, and his face was doing a true thing, I'll grant him that — real pride, no fake in it.
"I'm telling you, I married the jam queen of this county. Give it up for the jam queen!"
And the room did. Clapped. Somebody whooped.
Marlene grabbed my arm and shook it. Faces turned to me, warm and smiling, Gary beaming like a man who'd finally, finally done the thing his wife had been after him for — and I sat there in the blue dress with my face gone hot, clapping along a little because what else does a woman do, and something in me curdled.
Because he'd done it wrong again. And this time I couldn't even be sure he knew.
The clapping died and the pie came and the room went back to its noise, and I sat there turning it over.
Jam queen. Forty other jams — it was forty-one, first out of forty-one, but forty rounds better in a room.
Beat forty other jams. He'd made it a bit.
A warm, funny little bit with a crown on it, the crown his to hand out, king of the room setting a paper crown on his wife, and the room had clapped for Gary's charm the way it always claps for Gary's charm.
It just happened to have my name near it this time.
Marlene leaned over as the noise came back up. "He's proud of you, hon. You can see it all over him." She meant it kind. They all did, the whole warm table of them, turned to me with their pie forks and their good wishes. I smiled at Marlene and ate my pie.
He found me by the coats after, glowing. "Did you hear that room?" he said, holding my wrap. "They loved it. I told 'em, hon. Stood up in front of a hundred people and told 'em about your ribbon. That's what you wanted, right? Out loud, in front of everybody."
I waited till we were in the car. I've learned not to do it in a room full of coats.
"You didn't tell them my name, Gary."
He'd been backing out of the lot, easy, humming, still up on the applause. He stopped, half into the lane, the car rocking on its brakes. "I did. Said Opal. Said my wife Opal."
"You said it once, then spent the rest on 'jam queen.
' You told them I beat forty jams. Not that I took first out of forty-one with a card that says best in show.
Not that I've got thirty years of ribbons or a state qualifier I've earned six times over.
You didn't tell them what I did." I watched his profile in the dashboard light.
"You told them a punchline with a ribbon on it.
And they clapped for the man telling it. "
"Opal—"
"They clapped for you," I said. "Same as always. You just held me up over your head a second while they did it."
He pulled the car back into park. A couple went by in the headlights, laughing, gone.
Gary sat there with both hands on the wheel, and I watched him hunt for the exit, the joke, the way out — and watched him not take it.
That was new. A week ago he'd have said, come on, hon, it was a nice thing, why can't you just take a nice thing. He didn't.
"I thought I did it right that time," he said finally. Quiet. "I really did think that."
"I know you did. That's the part that's hard.
You think loud is the same as true. You think if the room feels good, the thing got said.
It didn't get said, Gary. My name got waved.
There's a difference, and you can't hear it yet, and I'm tired of being the one to teach you the difference at my own party. "
"Then teach me," he said. "I mean it. Tell me what right looks like.
Because I stood up in that room ready to give you the whole thing, and I thought I did, and now you're telling me I handed them a joke, and I — I can't see the line, Opal.
Can't see where I crossed it. Show me. Draw it for me and I'll never cross it again. "
I looked at him a long moment in the dash light. There was something real in the asking. He'd never once asked me to show him. But I was too tired and too raw to be his teacher that night, and I'd started to think that was half the trouble in the first place.
"I'm not going to draw you a map to the thing you should've felt on your own," I said. "That's the work. You find the line by paying attention when you've crossed it, not by getting me to paint it so you can step over clean." I turned and looked out the windshield. "Take me home."
He drove us home slow. Neither of us turned the radio on.
Louise called the next morning, Wednesday, off her Tuesday rhythm, which meant she meant it. I was pouring strawberry into the last of the state-batch jars, hands full, so I put her on speaker.
"Opal," she said. "I'd like you to come have coffee on the porch. Just us. Leave Gary home."
I set the funnel down. "Just us."
"Just us," Louise said. "I've got some things to say to you that I've been getting from the wrong end for fifteen years, and I'd like to say them to your face for once, with nobody in the room to steer it.
" A pause, then softer, close as that woman gets to tender.
"Come Friday. I'll make the good coffee.
Bring me a jar of whatever you've got that hasn't found a home yet. "
"Why now," I asked her. "Fifteen years you've gone around him quiet. Why call me and say it out loud now?"
She was quiet a second on the line. "Because he came out to my porch," she said.
"Sat in his father's chair and told me your whole record like a man reading names off a wall.
Every ribbon. The cookbook. The order. Told me he was the reason I never knew.
" Her voice did something it rarely does.
"Fifteen years I went around a wall, Opal.
This week the wall stood up and told on itself.
I figure if he can finally say it, I can too.
I'm too old to keep quiet about a thing that's already been said out loud. "
I sat down slow on the kitchen chair. He'd gone to her porch. He hadn't told me that.
I looked at the row of unlabeled jars on the shelf. The blank ones. The ones I hadn't been able to name.
"I'll come," I said. "Friday."
And I meant it, and something braced tight in me for a month let down half an inch, because here was one person in Gary's whole world reaching around him to get to me on purpose — not because she'd given up on him, but because she wouldn't wait on him to bring me by.
I picked the label gun up after we hung up.
Turned it over in my hand. Set it back down.
Not yet. But I'd picked it up, and that was more than I'd done in two weeks.