The Business Trip My Husband Faked

The first thing I ever noticed about Opal was that she did not pretend. At the wedding she took my hands and looked at me a long time and said, you are marrying my easy child, honey, and easy is not the same as good, so you keep your eyes open. I thought it was a strange thing to say at a wedding. I was young. I laughed it off. She did not laugh. She just held my hands and let me see that she meant it, and then she let go and went and fixed herself a plate.

I have thought about that moment more in the last year than in all the years before it.

Opal and I did not start close. She was prickly and I was timid, and for a long time I kept my distance the way you keep your distance from a woodstove you are not sure about. What brought us together was the babies that never came. Dale and I tried for years and it did not happen, and somewhere in the middle of all that grief, with Dale off on the road and me alone in a quiet house, it was Opal who showed up. She did not bring a casserole and a verse and leave. She sat. She let me cry on her kitchen table and she did not tell me it was God’s plan or that it would happen when I stopped trying. She said, some of us do not get the thing we ask for, and we are not owed a reason, and I am sorry, and I am here. That was the day the woodstove quit scaring me.

After that we were something to each other. I started going out to Red Hollow Road on my own, not as Dale’s wife but as myself. I did her hair on the back porch. She taught me to put up figs and to tell a good pecan from a hollow one by the weight of it in your hand. She told me about Earl, the good and the bad of him, and about Dale as a boy, which was a harder story than she let most people hear. She told me Dale had always been a leaver. Not mean, she said. Just a leaver. When a thing got heavy he found a reason to be somewhere else, and he had been doing it since he was tall enough to reach the truck keys.

I did not want to believe it. You do not want to believe a thing like that about the man you sleep next to. But I filed it away, the way you file away a smell of smoke in a house, telling yourself it is probably nothing.