Part 1: Supper in the Driveway
“It still works fine, Karen.”
My husband said it on a Saturday afternoon in late April, standing in our driveway. His hand rested on the side of a bass boat that hadn’t 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. A 150 Mercury motor hung off the back, and the trailer underneath sat lopsided, 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 couldn’t think where else to put them.
“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 the moment I knew exactly where the money had come from.
My name is Karen Schmitz. I’m fifty-three, and for twenty-two years I’ve been a teller at the First State Bank in Cambridge, Iowa.
For six of those years, I moved forty dollars a week from my paycheck into a savings account we called the kitchen account.
Forty dollars, every Friday. I made it an automatic transfer so I couldn’t talk myself out of it.
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 stood at eleven thousand and twelve dollars.
I knew the figure because I’m a bank teller. I count other people’s money for a living, and I’d counted my own every Friday on my lunch break for six years. I’d sit in my car in the bank parking lot with a ham sandwich, looking at that number on my phone.
The contractor’s quote hung 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 the labor.
Our kitchen had been put in when the house was built in 1978. The cabinets were dark brown, with doors that sagged on their hinges. The stove had exactly one working burner, and it only worked on high.
So for thirty-two years, every pot of gravy I’d made had been 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 to take that money out, and the girl at the Nevada branch had every reason to hand it over.
“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.
Nothing could be taken back. There was no one to call and no store to return it to. The man and my eleven thousand dollars were somewhere on Interstate 35, headed south toward Kansas City.
I set the milk on the hood of my car.
I set the potatoes beside it.
“Well,” I said. “Thank you for telling me.”
He blinked at me as though I’d spoken a foreign language.
I think he’d braced for tears. Or for me to throw something. Or to stomp into the house and slam the screen door so hard the glass rattled.
I did none of it.
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 went in the roasting pan alongside it, with onions underneath. I made the 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, a wedding present from my mother in 1994. I only use it on Thanksgiving and Easter.
Rick was out in the garage, rummaging 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.
“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 tip it up on its side to get it through the doorway.
Rick came over and grabbed the other end without a word. That’s the kind of man Rick is. He’ll help you carry anything, no matter what it is or why.
We set it down in the driveway, right beside the boat.
Then I went back inside for my mother’s tablecloth.
But I didn’t spread it over the kitchen table. I climbed into that boat using the little step stool from the laundry room, and I laid the tablecloth across the padded bench seat in the middle, the one between the two consoles.
It fit almost perfectly.
I tucked the corners under the cushions.
Then I carried out two plates, two forks, two knives, two glasses of iced tea, and the pot roast in its pan.
I set everything 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 spread my paper napkin in my lap.
At last, Rick climbed the step stool, swung a leg over the side, and sat 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 put the gravy boat on it, and the dinner rolls, and a stick of butter on a saucer. Whenever we needed something, I reached over the side of the boat for it.
We ate.
Neither 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 of cut grass and my pot roast.
When we finished, I carried the dishes in and washed them at my sink. The cabinet door by my hip hasn’t stayed shut since about 2009, and I bumped it closed with my knee three times while I rinsed.
Rick came in, picked up a dish towel, and dried.
He said nothing about the boat.
Neither did I.
Across the street lives Marlys Henning.
She’s seventy-four and has lived in that little white ranch house since before Rick and I bought ours. She’s watched everything on our street for fifty years, and she had no intention of missing anything now.
On the second night, at six o’clock sharp, Marlys came out her front door carrying a folding lawn chair and a cup of coffee.
She set the chair on her front step and sat down. She crossed her ankles.
She didn’t wave. She didn’t call across the street. She just sat and watched, the way you’d watch a Hawkeyes game you had money on.
That night I made meatloaf, with baked potatoes and green beans from the freezer.
I also 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 finished, he wiped his mustache with his napkin.
“That was good, Karen.”
“Thank you,” I said.
I meant it. I wasn’t angry at the meatloaf.
By the third night, Marlys had added 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 with 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.
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 and worked his way up through 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 eleven days straight. He came home with frostbite on two fingers and slept 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 lay flattened as if someone had run an iron across it. He came home so worn out he ate supper standing at the counter and went straight to bed.
In thirty-two years of marriage, he had 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 going soft.
When Rick was fourteen, he saved all summer from detasseling corn and bought a used Honda minibike. Red. Two hundred dollars.
The next spring, his father sold it at the farm sale. He didn’t ask Rick, and he didn’t even tell him first.
Rick came home from school and it was simply gone.
He told me that story once, the first year we were married, on the porch steps at his parents’ place after Sunday dinner.
He never told it again.
But I remembered.
By the fourth night, the whole thing had turned into an event.
Duane Becker and Lyle Ostrander came by. They’ve fished with Rick since the three of them were in high school together.
They’d heard about the boat at the co-op, and then about the suppers at the Casey’s gas station.
They pulled up in Duane’s pickup at a quarter past six. The two of them stood at the end of our driveway with their seed caps in their hands, as if 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 carried 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 dangling over the motor.
Four grown people eating chicken and noodles in a bass boat, in a driveway, in the middle of Iowa.
Marlys sat across the street with her lawn chair and her coffee. The Mason jar candle flickered in the cup holder.
Duane declared it 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.
