The One Who Knew

For nineteen years I had a standing Friday at ten o'clock, wash and set, with a woman named Opal.

Opal was eighty-four when she quit driving and eighty-eight when she quit coming, and in all that time I never once told her a piece of news she didn't already have.

I tried. Lord, I tried. I'd hear on a Thursday night that the bank was changing hands, and I'd carry it in on Friday morning like a cake, and I'd set it down in front of her, and Opal would say, "Mm."

It was a specific "mm." It was the "mm" of a woman being told the ending of a movie she had seen in the theater.

She knew who was expecting before the husbands did. She knew which marriages were finished a full year before the furniture moved. She knew the high school was getting a new principal while the old one was still picking out a retirement cake.

And here's the part that bothered me. Opal didn't gossip. She never passed a thing along. In nineteen years I couldn't tell you one secret I learned from her. She wasn't a spreader. She just could not be surprised.

I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to work out her source. She didn't go out much. She had a telephone on the kitchen wall and no other kind. She went to church on Sunday and to me on Friday and to the grocery store when her daughter took her.

So one Friday I just asked. I had her under the dryer, which is the only place you can ask a woman something and be sure she'll stay put.

I said, "Opal, how do you always know?"

She thought about it for a while. Then she said, "Honey, I don't find things out. I just remember what people said the first time."

That's all it was.

People will tell you everything. Then a few years go by, and they tell it again, and it's been cleaned up. He never wanted the farm anyway. She always planned on moving back. They'd been talking about selling for ages. Most of us take the new version and throw the old one out, because that's the polite thing to do.

Opal kept the originals.

She remembered a man at nineteen saying he'd die before he let his brother have that land. So forty years later, when everybody else was shocked, Opal said "mm."

I've been at this thirty years and I've gotten good at listening. Opal was good at something harder. She was good at having listened.

She passed four winters ago. The church was full. I looked around at that crowd and I'd say about half of them looked sorry and a good third looked relieved, and there was some overlap.

I thought about her the whole time I was writing Twila Byers.

Twila is eighty-one and she spent her working life at the telephone switchboard, back when every call in town went through one woman's hands. She kept the originals too. Dial D for Dye is about what happens when somebody remembers that.

It's out now: Dial D for Dye

Be careful what you say the first time. Somebody's keeping it.