“I wish you had come over here last night like you usually do on Fridays,” Betty Jean said when I entered her house a few minutes past ten a.m. “The boys spent the night with Alline, so you and me could have had a real nice quiet evening.”
“I would have come last night, but . . . you know,” I said with a hangdog expression on my face that I had been using a lot lately. “Something came up.” I had no trouble coming up with a good excuse to tell Betty Jean when I disappointed her. The one I used the most was “something came up” and that was good enough. She rarely asked me for more details, so I rarely told her. She made it easy for me to keep living two lives. It was one of the reasons I still didn’t feel too guilty about what I was doing. I was giving Joyce everything I said I would: love and devotion. I had promised her that I would never leave her, and that was one promise I planned to keep. But I had not promised her that I would be faithful. Whenever it felt like guilt was creeping up on me, I looked at the situation from that angle. I was also giving Betty Jean everything I’d promised her: my love and security. I had all the bases covered.
I glanced around the living room, pleased to see it looking so neat and smelling so good. I did a double-take when I noticed a huge picnic basket on the coffee table. There was a folded red-and-white-checked tablecloth on top of it. “What’s with this picnic basket?” I lifted the lid and peeped in. My breath caught in my throat when I saw what was inside: several pieces of fried chicken wrapped in wax paper, baked beans, a bowl of potato salad, six bottles of root beer pop, and half a dozen biscuits. I had not been on a picnic since Joyce and I celebrated our fourth wedding anniversary last year. She had packed a basket with exactly the same items that day, even down to a red-and-white-checked tablecloth for us to sit on. I didn’t believe in bad omens, but this coincidence made me shiver.
I was so caught up in my thoughts, Betty Jean had to pinch my arm to get my attention. “I hate it when you shut down on me like that,” she complained.
“I didn’t do no such thing.”
“Yes, you did just now. You been doing it more and more lately.”
“If I did, I didn’t mean to. What was we talking about?”
“I was talking about the carnival.”
“What carnival?”
“See there. You didn’t hear a word I said so you must have shut down”
“Okay, maybe I did. I’ll try not to do it again.”
“I hope you don’t because when you get that glazed look in your eyes, I get worried.”
“Honey, you ain’t got a damn thing to worry about. I love you to death and I’m going to continue doing everything possible to keep you and the boys happy.”
“Good. Now, like I was saying, you said we’d go to the carnival when it came through here. Well, it came yesterday and me and the boys been itching to go. They’ll be home in a little while.”
“I didn’t bring enough money for no carnival. Them rides ain’t as cheap as they used to be.”
“We ain’t got to ride on everything,” Betty Jean said. “And I made this picnic basket so we ain’t even got to spend no money on hot dogs and candy and whatnot.”
“I had planned for us to go on a long drive and do some fishing and maybe find a blackberry patch so we can pick enough berries for a few pies.”
“Oh, all right. I don’t want to go fishing or blackberry picking. We can just take a drive and go on a picnic. But I know it won’t be as much fun as the carnival.”
The pout on Betty Jean’s face was getting to me, but this was one time I couldn’t let her have her way. “Look, I know we’d have a lot of fun at the carnival and I’d love to go, but we can’t do that because . . . because it’s in Lexington this year and that’s too close to home,” I said.
“Whose home?”
“Mine. Them carnival people changed their route this year. It was supposed to be in Butler County.”
“So? It’ll take almost a whole hour to drive from here to Lexington, but I don’t mind. And you know how much the boys like to ride around in that car.”
I glanced toward the door. I didn’t want the boys to bust in and hear what I was about to say to Betty Jean. When I turned back around to face her, I could tell from the tight look on her face that she already knew what I was going to say. But I said it anyway. “We can’t go to that carnival, period. Lexington is only five miles from Branson where I live with my wife. Everybody I know will be at that carnival at some point. With our luck, if we show up there today, half of them will too. Come to think of it, any other day it would be the same thing.”
“Joyce might even be there, huh?” Betty Jean folded her arms and gave me a look that was so hot, my face felt like I’d stuck it in an oven.
“I doubt that, but people who know her will be. Them students from her school, and her daddy is like a kid when it come to carnivals, so he’ll probably be there every day as long as it’s in town.”
“I’m getting kind of tired of having to sneak around with you, Odell. It
