The Business Trip My Husband Faked

Opal got her diagnosis in the spring. It was her pancreas, and the doctor in Macon was kind and clear and did not give us much. Months, he said. Maybe to the fall if she was stubborn, and she was the stubbornest woman in Pauline County, so we got the fall.

I remember the drive home from that appointment. Opal sat in my passenger seat with the window cracked and her hand out in the wind like a girl, and she said, well, I am not going to spend what I have left being scared, so let us not do that. Then she said, Caroline, I am going to ask you for things before this is over, and some of them will be hard, and I need you to promise me you will not flinch. I promised. I did not know yet what I was promising.

Dale took the news about his mother the way Dale took every heavy thing. He said all the right words, he teared up at the kitchen sink, and then within a week he had found the busiest stretch of road his territory had seen in years. Suddenly there were dealers in Alabama who could only meet on weekends. Suddenly the company needed him for trainings. He would come home Thursday and be gone again Saturday, and when I asked him to come out to his mother’s with me he always had a reason, and the reason always sounded real enough that I felt small for pushing.

I covered for him at first. That is the part I am least proud of. When Opal asked after him I would say he was swamped, he sent his love, he would come by soon. She would look at me over her reading glasses with those pale eyes that did not miss much and she would say, mm, and go back to her crossword. She let me lie to her. I think she was letting me find out on my own, the way she had let me find out everything else.

Summer came on hard and Opal got smaller. I moved most of my hair clients to mornings and spent my afternoons on Red Hollow Road. We set up a bed in the front room so she could see the grove through the window. Hospice sent a nurse named Teresa, a broad calm woman from over in Cordele who had buried more people than the church had, and between the two of us we kept Opal comfortable and clean and laughing more than you would think a dying woman could laugh.