Part 2: The Thing He Couldn’t Say
After Duane and Lyle drove away, Rick stayed seated in the boat.
I began gathering the plates. He put his hand on my wrist, not hard, just enough to keep me there.
“Sit down a minute, Karen.”
I sat back down.
The candle had burned to about an inch. A semi rumbled by out on the highway, and 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 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 said nothing.
I learned long 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 a long while.
“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 time.
Then he said, “I’m sorry, Karen.”
It came out rough, as if it had been lodged crossways inside him for years.
“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 laid my hand on top of his, on the bench seat, on my mother’s tablecloth. 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 and works at the grain elevator in town. He and Amber rent a little house near the elementary school.
Amber had 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 beside 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 from the driver’s seat, fork in 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 clapped a hand over her mouth.
Then she climbed right up the step stool and sat on the front deck, because Amber grew up on a hog farm outside Maxwell, and not much in this world scares her.
Tyler lingered down on the driveway a while longer.
Then he pulled one of the kitchen chairs up beside 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 for 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 and 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, on their way back from setting a new pole out by the county line.
They came down our street, which isn’t on the way to anywhere. They came slowly, in a line, on purpose.
The first bucket truck honked twice.
The second honked three times.
The man driving the digger leaned all the way out his window and hollered, “Save me a plate, Schmitzy!”
Rick buried his face in both hands. His ears turned bright red.
But when he lowered his hands, 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 lifted her coffee cup at the trucks as they passed. One of the linemen raised a hand back at her.
By then, people were stopping.
Not a lot of them, but some.
A few cars slowed to a crawl 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 once 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 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 it over. 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.”
“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 learn 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 stopped 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, pumping air into that low tire.
Duane Becker owns a boat too, a twenty-year-old aluminum fishing boat he keeps in the pole shed 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 thing in her whole life.
Duane sat 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 a 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 pushed himself 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 as though nothing had happened and talked about the Cubs.
But Rick didn’t say a word all through supper.
He just kept looking at me, across that tablecloth.
On the eighth night, it rained.
It rolled 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 beside me.
“We can’t eat out there in this,” he said.
“Sure we can,” I said.
I pulled the big golf umbrella out of the front closet, the one I got at the bank’s customer appreciation day. I also took a second tablecloth, a plastic one, to lay 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 and dripped off the edges onto my shoulders. The Mason jar candle blew out within the first five minutes, and I didn’t bother relighting it.
Across the street, Marlys sat on her front step under the porch roof, in her lawn chair, wrapped 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.
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.
I looked at him across the bench seat. Rainwater dripped off the bill of his cap. He looked fifty-five years old and fourteen years old at the 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 slipped 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.
