The Business Trip My Husband Faked

Those afternoons are the most precious thing I own now. I would get there around one, after I had swept the hair off my own back porch, and I would bring whatever I had cooked, and we would eat a little and then I would read to her. She liked the old westerns and she liked the farm report and she did not like the news, so we skipped the news. The church ladies came and went with their dishes. Della came most days and the two of them would get to arguing about people who had been dead for forty years like it had happened that morning. Some afternoons Opal did not have the strength to talk at all and I would just do her hair, slow, the way she liked it, and she would close her eyes and let me, and the only sound in the house was the oscillating fan and the pecan limbs moving against the window screen.

Through all of it I kept waiting on Dale to feel what I felt sitting in that room. I kept thinking any day now it would land on him that his mother was leaving the earth and he would drop everything and come. Dale came out maybe four times that whole summer. I counted. I hate that I counted but I did.

The last real conversation he had with his mother that I witnessed was in July. He stood in the doorway of the front room with his cap in his hands like a boy called to the principal and he could not make himself cross the floor to the bed. Opal watched him stand there. She did not help him. Finally she said, Dale, honey, you can come in, I am not catching. And he said he was sorry, he had a thing, he just wanted to check in, and he was gone inside of ten minutes. I walked him to his truck. He would not look at me. He said, I cannot do it, Caroline, I cannot sit there and watch her like that, it is not who I am. I said, then who are you. He did not answer. He got in the truck and drove back toward town and I stood in that red dirt yard and understood, finally and all the way down, what his mother had tried to tell me seventeen years before at my own wedding.

In August the company meeting came up. Dale told me on a Tuesday night, offhand, scraping his plate, that he had a regional sales conference in Charlotte the third week of September. Four days, maybe five. Big deal for his numbers, he said. Could not be missed.