“It still works fine, Karen.”
My husband said it standing in our driveway on a Saturday afternoon in late April. His hand was resting on the side of a bass boat that had not been there when I left for the grocery store.
It was green and silver metal flake. The kind that sparkles like a bowling ball under the lights at the alley. There was a 150 Mercury motor hung on the back of it, and a trailer underneath with one tire lower than the other.
I had a gallon of milk in one hand and a ten-pound sack of potatoes in the other.
I just stood there holding them. I didn’t know where else to put them.
Ezoic
“What works fine?” I said.
“The kitchen.”
Rick didn’t look at me. He looked at the boat.
“The cabinets close. The stove heats. My mother cooked on worse for forty years.”
That was when I understood exactly where the money had come from.
Ezoic
My name is Karen Schmitz. I’m fifty-three years old. I’ve been a teller at the First State Bank in Cambridge, Iowa, for twenty-two years.
And for six years, I put forty dollars a week from my paycheck into a savings account we called the kitchen account.
Forty dollars. Every single Friday. I set it up as an automatic transfer so I couldn’t talk myself out of it.
Ezoic
Some weeks I had to move the money back out. The fall Tyler was twenty and his transmission went. The winter the water heater died and flooded the basement. But I always caught it back up.
By that April, the balance sat at eleven thousand and twelve dollars.
I knew the number because I’m a bank teller. I count other people’s money for a living. And I’d counted mine every Friday on my lunch break for six years. Sitting in my car in the bank parking lot with a ham sandwich, looking at that number on my phone.
Ezoic
The contractor’s quote was hanging on our refrigerator under a magnet shaped like an ear of corn.
Eleven thousand dollars even.
New oak cabinets. A laminate countertop. A brand-new range where all four burners actually worked. And labor.
Our kitchen was put in when the house was built in 1978. Dark brown cabinets with doors that sagged on their hinges. A stove with exactly one burner that worked, and it only worked on high.
Ezoic
So every pot of gravy I’d made for thirty-two years, I’d made standing over it with a wooden spoon. Stirring and stirring so it wouldn’t scorch.
“Where did you get the money, Rick?” I asked.
I already knew.
“I got a cashier’s check yesterday,” he said. “At the branch over in Nevada.”
He finally looked at me.
“I knew better than to do it at your window.”
At least he was honest about that part.
It was a joint account. He had every right in the world to take that money out. And the girl at the Nevada branch had every reason to hand it to him.
“Who sold it to you?”
“Fella from Story City. He’s moving down by his daughter in Missouri. He had the papers all ready.”
Rick rubbed the back of his neck.
“He’s gone already, Karen. He left this morning.”
So that was that.
There was no taking it back. No one to call. No store to return it to. The man and my eleven thousand dollars were somewhere on Interstate 35, heading south toward Kansas City.
I set the milk down on the hood of my car.
I set the potatoes down next to it.
“Well,” I said. “Thank you for telling me.”
He blinked at me like I’d spoken a foreign language.
I think he’d been ready for me to cry. Or to throw something. Or to march into the house and slam the screen door so hard the glass rattled.
I didn’t do any of that.
I picked my groceries back up, went inside, and started supper.
I made pot roast. Because it was Saturday. And that’s what I make on Saturday.
Carrots and potatoes in the roasting pan with it. Onions underneath. Gravy over the one burner that worked on high, standing there stirring.
At ten minutes to six, I went to the hall closet and took out a tablecloth.
Not the everyday one.
The good one. Red and white checks. My mother gave it to me as a wedding present in 1994. I only use it on Thanksgiving and Easter.
Rick was out in the garage, digging through the life jackets he’d bought along with the boat. He didn’t see me carry the first kitchen chair out the front door.
He saw me carry the second one.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“Setting the table,” I said.
He watched me try to drag our kitchen table through the front door.
It’s a heavy maple table. I had to turn it up on its side to get it through the doorway.
Rick came over and took the other end without saying a word. Because that’s the kind of man Rick is. He’ll help you carry anything. Doesn’t matter what it is or why.
We set it down on the driveway, right beside the boat.
Then I went back inside and got my mother’s tablecloth.
But instead of spreading it over the kitchen table, I climbed up into that boat on the little step stool from the laundry room. And I spread the tablecloth over the padded bench seat in the middle of the boat. The one between the two consoles.
It fit almost perfectly.
I tucked the corners in under the cushions.
Then I brought out two plates. Two forks. Two knives. Two glasses of iced tea. And the pot roast in its pan.
I set everything down on the bench seat. On my mother’s tablecloth.
“Karen,” Rick said from the driveway. “What is this?”
“Supper,” I said. “Come eat before it gets cold.”
He stood there a long time.
I sat down in the passenger seat of that bass boat and put my paper napkin in my lap.
Finally, Rick climbed up the step stool, swung his leg over the side, and sat down across from me in the driver’s seat.
“The table’s right there,” he said, pointing down at it.
“I know,” I said. “I needed somewhere to put the bread.”
And I did use the table. I set the gravy boat on it. And the dinner rolls. And a stick of butter on a saucer. And I reached over the side of the boat for them whenever we needed them.
We ate.
Neither one of us said much.
A robin hopped across the front yard. Down the street, somebody was mowing their lawn for the first time that year. The whole block smelled like cut grass and my pot roast.
When we were done, I carried the dishes inside and washed them at my sink. The cabinet door next to my hip hasn’t stayed shut since about 2009. I bumped it closed with my knee three times while I rinsed.
Rick came in and picked up a dish towel and dried.
He didn’t say anything about the boat.
Neither did I.
Our neighbor across the street is Marlys Henning.
She’s seventy-four. She’s lived in that little white ranch house since before Rick and I ever bought ours. She’s watched everything that’s happened on our street for fifty years, and she has no intention of missing anything now.
On the second night, at six o’clock exactly, Marlys came out her front door carrying a folding lawn chair and a cup of coffee.
She set the chair on her front step. She sat down in it. She crossed her ankles.
She didn’t wave. She didn’t call across the street. She just sat there and watched. The way you’d watch a Hawkeyes game you had money on.
I made meatloaf that night. Baked potatoes. Green beans from the freezer.
And I lit a little vanilla candle in a pint Mason jar and set it in the cup holder by the steering wheel.
Rick looked at the candle.
Then he looked across the street at Marlys.
“She’s watching us,” he said.
“She’s watching the boat,” I said. “It’s a pretty boat.”
He made a sound in his throat that wasn’t quite a laugh.
He ate two helpings of meatloaf. When he was done, he wiped his mustache with his napkin.
“That was good, Karen.”
“Thank you,” I said.
And I meant it. I wasn’t angry at the meatloaf.
By the third night, Marlys had brought out a sweater and a plate of her own supper. She ate on her front step while we ate in the boat.
Later, I walked across the street and took her a piece of rhubarb pie.
She took the plate in both hands and looked up at me.
“Honey,” she said. “How long are you going to do this?”
“Until it’s done,” I said.
“Until what’s done?”
“I’ll know it when I see it.”
And that was the truth.
I want to say something about my husband right here.
Because a lot of people who heard about that boat later thought they knew exactly who he was.
They didn’t.
Rick has been a lineman for the rural electric co-op for thirty years.
He started at twenty-five as a groundman. Worked his way up through all the apprentice years to journeyman. For most of that time, he climbed wooden poles with steel hooks strapped to his boots and a leather belt around the pole.
When the ice storms came, he went. He went on Christmas Eve. He went on Tyler’s birthday.
One winter he was gone for eleven days straight. He came home with frostbite on two fingers and slept for a day and a half on the couch with his boots still on.
The summer of the derecho, he worked sixteen-hour days for three weeks. Setting new poles in fields where the corn was flattened like somebody had come through with an iron. He came home so tired he ate supper standing up at the counter, then went straight to bed.
In thirty-two years of marriage, he’d never asked for one thing for himself.
Not a new truck. Not a hunting trip to Montana with the guys. Not even a new recliner, when the old one tipped him sideways every time he leaned back.
His father was the reason.
Walt Schmitz farmed two hundred acres south of town. And he believed that a man who wanted something for himself was a man who was getting soft.
When Rick was fourteen, he saved up all summer from detasseling corn and bought himself a used Honda minibike. Red. Two hundred dollars.
The next spring, his father sold it at the farm sale. Without asking him. Without even telling him first.
Rick came home from school and it was just gone.
He told me that story once. The first year we were married. Sitting on the porch steps at his parents’ place after Sunday dinner.
He never told it again.
But I remembered it.
By the fourth night, it had turned into something.
Duane Becker and Lyle Ostrander came by. They’ve fished with Rick since they were all in high school together.
They’d heard about the boat at the co-op. Then they’d heard about the suppers at the Casey’s gas station.
They pulled up in Duane’s pickup at a quarter past six. Both of them stood at the end of our driveway with their seed caps in their hands. Like they’d come to a funeral visitation.
“Evening, Karen,” Duane said.
“Evening, Duane. Lyle. Have you two eaten?”
They looked at each other.
“There’s plenty,” I said. “It’s chicken and noodles.”
So I brought out two more plates.
Duane climbed in and sat on the front casting deck with his plate balanced on his knees. Lyle sat on the back deck with his feet hanging over the motor.
Four grown people eating chicken and noodles in a bass boat. In a driveway. In the middle of Iowa.
Marlys across the street with her lawn chair and her coffee. The Mason jar candle flickering in the cup holder.
Duane said it was the best boat he’d ever eaten in. Lyle asked for seconds. They talked about walleye at Saylorville Lake, and whether the crappies would be up in the shallows yet.
Rick laughed once. A real laugh.
Then he looked over at me. And stopped.
After Duane and Lyle drove off, Rick stayed sitting in the boat.
I started gathering up the plates. He put his hand on my wrist. Not hard. Just to keep me there.
“Sit down a minute, Karen.”
I sat back down.
The candle was down to about an inch. A semi went by out on the highway. The dog two houses down barked at it.
“I turned fifty-five in March,” Rick said.
“I know. I made the cake.”
“A letter came from the co-op in February. About my pension. What it’s going to be when I retire.”
He was looking down at his hands.
“I sat in the truck in the co-op parking lot and read it four times.”
“Was it bad?”
“No. It’s fine. It’s fair.”
He turned his wedding ring around on his finger.
“That’s what got me. It was fine. Thirty years of climbing poles in ice storms, and that’s what I had to show for it. A fair letter.”
I didn’t say anything.
I learned a long time ago that Rick talks when you let the quiet sit there.
“Dad never let me have one thing,” Rick said. “You know that. And I never asked him. I never asked you either.”
He shook his head slowly.
“And then I’m sitting in the truck with that letter. And I thought, I’m going to be dead someday. And I never had one single thing that was just mine.”
“So you bought a boat,” I said.
“So I bought a boat.”
He was quiet for a long time.
“With your kitchen,” he said. “I know it. I knew it when I signed the check. And I did it anyway. And then I told you the kitchen works fine, because I couldn’t think of one other thing to say.”
“It doesn’t work fine, Rick.”
“I know it doesn’t.”
He sat there a long while.
Then he said, “I’m sorry, Karen.”
It came out rough. Like it had been stuck crossways in him for a long time.
“I know you are,” I said.
I didn’t tell him it was all right.
It wasn’t all right.
But I reached over and put my hand on top of his, on the bench seat, on my mother’s tablecloth. And we sat there together until the candle went out.
The next night, I made supper in the boat again.
On the fifth night, our son came by with his wife.
Tyler is twenty-four. He works at the grain elevator in town. He and Amber rent a little house over by the elementary school.
He’d heard about it from Amber. Who’d heard about it from her mother. Who’d heard about it at Bible study.
Tyler stood at the end of the driveway with his hands jammed in his jacket pockets. Amber stood next to him holding a pan of brownies covered in foil.
“Mom,” Tyler said. “What are you doing?”
“Eating supper with your father,” I said. “You hungry? It’s tater tot casserole.”
Tyler looked at his dad.
Rick looked back at him from the driver’s seat. Fork in his hand. Co-op cap pushed back on his head.
“Don’t look at me,” Rick said. “I’m just a guest here.”
Amber laughed out loud. Then she slapped her hand over her mouth.
Then she climbed right up the step stool and sat down on the front deck. Because Amber grew up on a hog farm outside Maxwell, and not much in this world scares her.
Tyler stayed down on the driveway a while longer.
Then he pulled one of the kitchen chairs up next to the boat and ate off the maple table. Like a grown man who’d been stuck at the kids’ table at Thanksgiving.
When Rick went inside to get more iced tea, Tyler leaned over the side of the boat.
“Mom. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, honey.”
“Do you want me to talk to him?”
I looked at my son.
He has his father’s shoulders. His father’s way of standing with all his weight on one foot. And in twenty-four years, he has never once raised his voice at his father.
“No,” I said. “Your dad’s talking to himself just fine. Let him.”
On the sixth night, the co-op crew drove by.
Two bucket trucks and the big digger derrick. Coming back from setting a new pole out by the county line.
They came down our street. Our street isn’t on the way to anywhere. They came down it slowly. In a line. On purpose.
The first bucket truck honked twice.
The second one honked three times.
The man driving the digger leaned all the way out his window and hollered, “Save me a plate, Schmitzy!”
Rick put his face in both his hands. His ears turned bright red.
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But when he took his hands away, he was grinning.
“They are never going to let me live this down,” he said.
“No,” I said. “I don’t suppose they are.”
Marlys raised her coffee cup at the trucks as they went by. One of the linemen raised a hand back at her.
By then, people were stopping.
Not a lot. But some.
A few cars slowed way down going past. The Lutheran pastor’s wife walked her dog past our house twice in one evening. A boy on a bicycle circled the cul-de-sac three times and finally asked if he could sit in the boat after we were done eating.
I let him.
I never said one cross word to any of them.
And I never said one cross word to Rick.
Every single night, I cooked a real supper. I spread the good tablecloth over the bench seat. I lit the Mason jar candle. And I climbed in.
My sister Deb called that night from Marshalltown.
“Karen Ann,” she said. “Half of Marshall County knows you’re eating supper in a fishing boat.”
“Only half?”
“Are you trying to embarrass him?”
I thought about it. Deb deserved a real answer.
“No,” I said. “I’m trying to show him. If I’d yelled at him, he’d have yelled back. And then the boat would still be sitting in the driveway, and we’d both be mad. This way, he has to sit in it.”
“And look at it.”
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