The Business Trip My Husband Faked

I remember the date landed in my stomach like a stone, because Teresa had told me that morning, gently, in the kitchen, that she did not think Opal would see October. And some part of me that I had kept quiet all summer stood up and spoke. I said, Dale, your mother is dying. You cannot be in Charlotte. He put his fork down real careful and he said, it is work, Caroline, somebody has to keep this family running, and I will call her every day. I will call her every day. That was the sentence he hung it all on.

Here is the thing I did not know then and found out later, piece by piece, the way you find out everything in a town like Sawyer. There was no conference in Charlotte.

Opal found out first. Of course she did.

She had not been fooled for one minute. Later, after, I learned how she pieced it together, and every piece of it came from a person, not a paper, because that is how things travel out here. Her friend Della Maddox has a grandson, Cody, who runs a bass boat, and Cody mentioned to Della that he had seen Mr. Prewitt’s truck, the gray dually, parked up at a fishing cabin on Lake Blackshear that a bunch of the men rent in the fall. Della mentioned it to Opal over the phone the way women mention things, sideways, you know your Dale is up at the lake with the Hutto boys. And Opal, who had told everyone that Dale was away for work, got quiet.

Then she did a thing that I did not know about until it was done. She called Dale’s company. She told me later, laughing that dry laugh, that she called pretending to be a confused old woman trying to send her son a card to his hotel, which, she said, was not much of a stretch. A nice girl in the office told her there was no company conference that week, no event in Charlotte, nothing on the calendar. Mr. Prewitt had put in for personal days.

Opal said thank you, hung up the phone, and said nothing to Dale. That was the part that undid me when I learned it. She had him dead to rights in the middle of August and she sat on it. She did not call him and scream. She did not call me. She folded it up and put it away and kept smiling at her son on the four occasions he showed his face, and she started, quietly, to build the only thing she had left to build.

The week Dale left for his fake Charlotte, Opal turned a corner. She slept more. She ate less. But her mind stayed sharp as a tack right up near the end, and she used it.