Epilogue: Blue Vinyl
I sat there on that kitchen floor with six thousand dollars in folded twenties stacked around me, the floor still gritty from the old linoleum.
And I cried.
Harder than I’d cried in nine nights. Harder than the day the boat showed up.
Because this was the same man.
The man who bought a bass boat with my kitchen money was also the man who slipped a twenty-dollar bill into a coffee can every Friday for six years and never 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 beside 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. 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.
It came to 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 fit in a breakfast nook.
The corner by the back window had always been dead space. It was 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.
They’re 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 one of them works on low.
The first time I made gravy on it, I stood at that stove and never had to stir it once. Not once. It just sat there and simmered, slow and even, the way 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 tight on those two benches with our elbows bumping, and 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 beneath 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’d asked for exactly one thing.
He asked to 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 trimmed the foam to size and 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 stood 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.
Note: This story is a work of fiction inspired by real events. Names, characters, and details have been altered. Any resemblance is coincidental. The author and publisher disclaim accuracy, liability, and responsibility for interpretations or reliance. All images are for illustration purposes only.
