“And look at me,” I said. “Across that bench seat. Every single night.”
Deb was quiet for a while.
“You always were the smart one,” she said.
“I’m not smart,” I said. “I’m just tired of making gravy on high.”
I didn’t find out about what happened on the seventh night until later.
Rick told me himself. After it was all over. Sitting at a kitchen table that was finally back in the kitchen.
Duane came by early that day. Around four o’clock, while I was still at the bank.
Rick was out in the garage with the boat trailer, putting air in that low tire.
Duane Becker has a boat too. A twenty-year-old aluminum fishing boat he keeps in the pole shed out at his place. He and Rick and Lyle have fished out of it a hundred times.
Duane’s wife was named Joanne.
She died three winters ago. Cancer. I’d known Joanne since we were both on the PTA at the grade school. A sweet, round, laughing woman who made the best scotcheroos in Story County and never complained about one single thing in her whole life.
Duane sat down on an upside-down five-gallon bucket in our garage and watched Rick fill that tire.
Then he said, “Joanne wanted a new kitchen.”
Rick stopped what he was doing.
“Twenty years she wanted it,” Duane said. “Had a picture out of a magazine taped up inside the cupboard door. Right by the coffee filters. A white kitchen with blue tile.”
He turned his cap over in his hands.
“Every spring, I said next year. There was always something. A combine part. A new pickup. A new motor for the boat.”
He looked down at the concrete floor.
“She cooked on that old stove right up until she couldn’t stand up at it anymore.”
Rick told me he couldn’t think of one single thing to say.
“I took that picture down after the funeral,” Duane said. “I’ve still got it. It’s in my billfold.”
He stood up off the bucket.
“That’s all I came to say, Rick. I’ll see you at supper.”
And Duane did come to supper that night. He ate my ham and scalloped potatoes in the boat like nothing had happened. He talked about the Cubs.
But Rick didn’t say one word all through supper.
He just kept looking at me. Across that tablecloth.
On the eighth night, it rained.
It came in from the west around five o’clock. A soft, steady May rain.
I stood at the living room window and watched it bead up on all that green metal flake.
Rick came in from the garage and stood next to me.
“We can’t eat out there in this,” he said.
“Sure we can,” I said.
I got the big golf umbrella out of the front closet. The one I got at the bank’s customer appreciation day. And a second tablecloth. The plastic one. To go over the top of the good one.
We sat in that boat under a golf umbrella and ate beef stew.
The rain drummed on the umbrella. It dripped off the edges onto my shoulders. The Mason jar candle went out in the first five minutes, and I didn’t bother to light it again.
Across the street, Marlys sat on her front step under her porch roof. In her lawn chair. Wrapped up in a crocheted afghan. Drinking coffee.
“That woman,” Rick said, “has no life of her own.”
“She has ours,” I said.
He laughed.
And then he didn’t laugh.
He set his spoon down in his bowl.
“Karen,” he said. “What do you want me to do?”
It was the first time in eight nights he’d asked me that.
I looked at him across the bench seat. Rainwater was dripping off the bill of his cap. He looked fifty-five years old and fourteen years old at the exact same time.
“I don’t want you to do anything just because I want you to,” I said. “That’s not how this works, Rick. You know that. I’m not your daddy. And I’m not selling anything at a farm sale.”
He flinched.
I hadn’t meant to say that last part. It just came out.
But I didn’t take it back.
“I’m going to make supper tomorrow night,” I said. “Pot roast. Because it’s Saturday. And I’m going to serve it right here. Whatever you decide, I’ll be sitting on this seat at six o’clock.”
We finished our stew in the rain.
On Saturday, I made pot roast.
Carrots and potatoes in the pan. Onions underneath. Gravy stirred over the one burner that only works on high.
At ten minutes to six, I carried out my mother’s tablecloth and spread it over the bench seat. I lit the candle in the Mason jar. I set two places. I brought out the roast and set it on the bench between the plates.
Marlys was already in her lawn chair.
Duane and Lyle had parked at the curb.
Tyler and Amber came walking up the sidewalk from where they’d left their car at the corner.
Three cars were pulled over on the shoulder across the street. The pastor’s wife was walking her dog again.
Rick wasn’t in the garage.
He wasn’t anywhere I could see.
At six o’clock exactly, our front door opened.
Rick came down the front steps in his good shirt. The light blue button-down he wore to Tyler’s wedding. He’d shaved. He’d combed his hair wet. And he was holding a folded piece of paper in his hand.
He didn’t climb into the boat.
He walked right past it. He stopped at the very end of the driveway, where everybody on the street could see him.
A white pickup truck pulled up behind Duane’s.
A young man got out. Maybe thirty. Wearing a Hawkeyes sweatshirt. Holding an envelope.
“This is Jeff,” Rick said. Loud enough for the whole street to hear. “He’s from Ames. He’s buying a boat.”
Across the street, Marlys set her coffee cup down on the step.
Rick unfolded the piece of paper.
“Karen,” he said. “Come stand by me before I sign this.”
I climbed out of the boat on the step stool. I walked down to the end of the driveway and stood next to my husband.
It was the boat’s title.
He laid it down flat on the hood of Jeff’s pickup. He took a pen out of his shirt pocket.
And in front of the whole street, he signed it over.
Jeff handed him the envelope.
Rick didn’t open it.
He turned around and put it in my hands.
“It’s a cashier’s check,” he said. “Ten thousand two hundred dollars. I lost eight hundred on it, Karen. That part’s on me.”
I looked down at the envelope in my hands. I couldn’t see it very well. My eyes had gone blurry.
“I’m sorry,” Rick said.
And this time it didn’t come out rough at all.
It came out plain and clear. Like a man saying his own name.
“You saved for six years for that kitchen. Forty dollars at a time. And I took it for something to prove I was still somebody. I was wrong. Whatever’s left, I’ll make up with overtime.”
Nobody on that whole street said one word.
Then, from across the road, Marlys started clapping.
Slowly at first.
Then Duane started clapping. Then Amber. Then Lyle. Then the people standing by their cars on the shoulder. Then the pastor’s wife, with the dog leash looped around her wrist.
Tyler didn’t clap.
He walked up the driveway and put his arms around his father.
Rick held onto him for a long time.
Then Rick turned to Jeff.
“One thing,” he said. “Would you mind if we ate supper in her one last time first? My wife made pot roast.”
Jeff laughed and said he didn’t mind one bit.
So Jeff ate with us. He sat on the back deck with his plate on his knees. He said it was the best pot roast he’d ever had in his life.
I believe he meant it.
When the plates were empty, Jeff backed his pickup up to the trailer hitch. Rick and Duane helped him hook up. Cross the safety chains. Check the trailer lights.
Then Rick stood there in the driveway with his hand resting on the side of that green and silver boat. One last time.
Then he took his hand away.
And Jeff drove it off down the street toward Highway 65.
And our driveway was empty except for a maple kitchen table, two chairs, and my mother’s red-and-white tablecloth folded over the back of one of them.
On Monday morning, Rick took a week of vacation.
He’d been saving those days for deer season.
He and Tyler started tearing out the 1978 kitchen cabinets themselves. Rick said there was no reason on earth to pay a contractor to swing a pry bar when he had two good arms and a son.
The contractor said fine. He’d knock a thousand dollars off the quote for demolition.
They carried the old brown cabinets out to the driveway and stacked them right where the boat used to sit.
Duane came over with his flatbed trailer to haul them to the county dump. Lyle brought a cooler of pop. Marlys brought her lawn chair.
On Tuesday afternoon, Tyler took down the very last upper cabinet. The one above the refrigerator. Nobody ever opened that one, because you needed a step stool to reach it.
He handed me what was inside.
It was my coffee can.
My kitchen can.
A big red Folgers can with a slot I’d cut into the plastic lid with a paring knife six years ago. The same week I set up the transfer at the bank.
I’d started it for the little things. Loose change. The odd dollar bill. Money for new canisters, or a rug for in front of the sink, once the kitchen was finally done.
I’d drop coins through the slot and never open it. Because I wanted it to be a surprise for myself someday.
It was a lot heavier than I remembered.
I sat right down on the floor of my gutted kitchen with my back against the bare wall. And I pulled the lid off.
Under a layer of quarters and dimes, that can was packed tight with twenty-dollar bills.
Folded in half. Then in half again. Small enough to fit through the slot.
Hundreds of them.
I started counting. Because I count money for a living. And that’s what my hands know how to do.
Tyler sat down on the floor next to me and helped me stack them.
Three hundred and twelve twenty-dollar bills.
Six thousand, two hundred and forty dollars.
Rick was standing in the kitchen doorway with a pry bar in his hand.
He didn’t come in.
“Every Friday,” he said quietly. “Since the week you cut that slot. I’d stop in here on the way out to the truck in the morning.”
“For six years?”
“Storm pay, mostly. A little out of my lunch money.”
He looked down at the floor.
“I never said anything because I didn’t know how to. You’d have told me we couldn’t afford it.”
“We couldn’t,” I said.
“I know.”
He finally looked up at me.
“I just figured someday you’d open it. And it’d be a good day.”
I sat there on that kitchen floor with six thousand dollars in folded twenties stacked all around me. The floor still gritty from the old linoleum.
And I cried.
Harder than I’d cried in nine nights. Harder than I cried the day the boat showed up.
Because this was the same man.
The man who bought a bass boat with my kitchen money. And the man who slipped a twenty-dollar bill into a coffee can every single Friday for six years, and never once said a word about it.
I’d been married to both of them for thirty-two years.
Rick leaned the pry bar against the wall. He came over and sat down on the floor next to me.
Tyler got up quietly and went out to the driveway.
“I’m sorry I said it works fine,” Rick said.
“I’m sorry I made you eat supper in a boat for nine days,” I said.
“No, you’re not.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not.”
He put his arm around me. And we sat there on the floor of our bare kitchen, surrounded by all those twenties, until Tyler hollered in that Duane was back with the trailer.
With the boat money and the coffee can money together, we had more than the contractor’s quote.
Better than sixteen thousand five hundred dollars. Counting my last two Friday transfers, and a coffee can’s worth of quarters and dimes.
So I called the contractor back and asked if he could put in a breakfast nook.
The corner by the back window had always been dead space. It’s where the mop bucket lived.
He said he could.
Rick asked if he could build the benches himself.
He did.
He spent three weekends on them out in the garage. Duane handed him boards. Lyle sat on the bucket and told him everything he was doing wrong.
Solid oak, to match the new cabinets. Two benches facing each other across a little table. Right under the back window, where I can see Marlys’s front step.
The new cabinets went in the first week of June.
Light oak. Doors that close all the way. Doors that stay closed.
And the new range has four burners. And every single one of them works on low.
The first time I made gravy on it, I stood at that stove and didn’t have to stir it once. Not once. It just sat there and simmered, slow and even, like gravy is supposed to.
I laughed out loud. All alone in my brand-new kitchen.
That first Saturday, I made pot roast. Carrots and potatoes in the pan. Onions underneath.
And we ate it in the new breakfast nook.
Marlys came over. So did Duane and Lyle. And Tyler and Amber. We were packed in tight on those two benches, elbows bumping, but nobody minded one bit.
My mother’s red-and-white tablecloth was spread over the little oak table.
Marlys sat down. She ran her hand across the bench cushion underneath her.
Then she looked at me.
“Karen,” she said. “Isn’t this the blue vinyl off that boat?”
It was.
When Rick sold the boat to Jeff, he asked for exactly one thing.
He asked if he could keep the bench seat cushions. The blue vinyl ones from between the two consoles. Where I’d spread my mother’s tablecloth for nine nights in a row.
Jeff said sure. He was going to buy new ones anyway.
So Rick cut the foam down to size. And he stretched that same blue vinyl back over it, to fit his new oak benches.
They’re the softest seats in the whole house.
“He asked to keep one thing,” I told Marlys.
Rick was standing at the stove with his back to us, carving the pot roast.
He didn’t turn around.
But I could see his ears going red under his co-op cap.
And I could see that he was smiling.
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