The Business Trip My Husband Faked

She asked me to help her write letters. I thought it was a dying woman tying off loose ends, and I suppose it was, but it was more than that. For three afternoons that week I sat at her bedside with a legal pad and good pens and I wrote down what she told me, word for word, the way she wanted it, for her sister up in Tennessee, for Brenda, for the two or three church women who had been true to her. Little letters. Plain and loving and honest in the way only Opal was honest.

And then she said, now I need you to write one more, and you have to promise me you will not read it back to yourself while you do it, and you will seal it when it is done, and you will not open it. I said, Opal, I am the one holding the pen, I am going to read it. She said, no. I am going to speak it slow and you are going to write it down and you are not going to let your eye travel back up the page. Can you do that for me. I said I would try. She said trying was not a promise. I promised.

I do not know how I kept it, but I kept it. I wrote that letter looking at her face and not at the page, taking it down line by line, and when it was done she had me fold it and seal it in an envelope and write one name on the front, and the name was not mine. Then she had me do a strange thing. She had me carry it, myself, in person, to three different houses that evening. To Della Maddox. To Teresa the nurse. And to Preacher Hollis at the parsonage. To each one she had told me the same words to say. She wants you to know this exists, and where it is, and she wants your word that if anything happens to smooth it over or lose it, you will stand up and make sure it gets read. All three of them took my hands at their doors, the way people out here do, and gave her their word.

I did not understand. I thought it was the morphine or the fear making her careful. I drove home that night with my hands shaking on the wheel and I could not have told you why.