The Business Trip My Husband Faked
My husband faked a business trip so he would not have to sit with his dying mother and she made sure the family found out
The last clear thing Opal said to me, with her hand in mine and the oxygen hissing soft beside the bed, was that I had been a better child to her than any she carried. I told her to hush. She did not hush. Opal Prewitt never hushed a day in her life, and she was not going to start on the way out of it.
I want to tell this right, from the front, because people in Sawyer have a version of it now and most of the version is true, but the shape of it got passed mouth to mouth at the Piggly Wiggly and at the feed store and in the fellowship hall until it turned into a story about a bad man getting what he had coming. That part is not wrong. But it leaves out the woman who built the whole thing, slow and quiet, from a hospital bed on Red Hollow Road, and I will not let her get left out of her own ending.
My name is Caroline. I was married to Dale Prewitt for seventeen years. Opal was his mother. By the time she died, she was more mine than his, and both of us knew it, and that is where this starts.
We live in Sawyer, Georgia, which is not on most maps and is not trying to be. It is pecan country, red clay and cotton and long rows of trees that somebody’s great-granddaddy planted, a Baptist church on one end of the square and a Methodist on the other and a Waffle House out by the highway that stays open when everything else is dark. I keep the books two mornings a week at Odom’s Feed and Seed and I cut hair the rest of the time out of the back room of our house. Dale sold equipment and chemical for a farm supply company that covers four counties, which meant he was gone a lot, which I was used to, which is part of how a thing like this can happen without you seeing it coming.
I married into the Prewitts when I was twenty-four. Dale was handsome then and still is, the kind of handsome that learns early it can get by on a smile and never bothers to learn anything else. His daddy, Earl, was a mechanic who drank a little and loved hard and died of his heart out in the side yard the year before I came along. So it was just Opal left, out on the family place, a low brick house with a tin-roof porch her husband built and a pecan grove behind it that she managed herself with a man who came to shake the trees in the fall.