Nine Suppers in a Bass Boat

Marlys

Our neighbor across the street is Marlys Henning. She is seventy-four and has lived in that house since before Rick and I bought ours. She had seen everything happen on our street for fifty years and she did not intend to miss anything now.

On the second night she came out her front door at six o’clock exactly with a folding lawn chair and a cup of coffee. She set the chair on her front step, sat down in it and crossed her ankles.

She did not wave. She did not call over. She just watched, the way you would watch a ball game you had money on.

I made meatloaf that night, baked potatoes and green beans from the freezer. I lit a little 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 was not quite a laugh. He ate two helpings of meatloaf. When he was done he wiped his mustache and said, “That was good, Karen.”

“Thank you,” I said. And I meant it. I was not angry at the meatloaf.

By the third night, Marlys had brought a sweater and a plate of her own supper. She ate on her front step while we ate in the boat.

When I went across later to take her a piece of rhubarb pie, she took it 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,” I said. And that was the truth.

The Men Who Climb Poles

I want to say something about my husband, because people who heard about the boat later thought they knew who he was. They did not.

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 wood poles with hooks strapped to his boots and a 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 and 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 poles in fields where the corn was flattened like somebody had ironed it. He came home so tired he ate standing up at the counter.

He had never asked for one thing for himself. Not a truck. Not a hunting trip. Not a new recliner, even when the old one tipped him sideways.

His father was the reason. Walt Schmitz farmed two hundred acres south of town and believed that a man who wanted something for himself was a man who was getting soft. When Rick was fourteen he saved up for a used minibike, and his father sold it at the farm sale the next spring without asking him.

Rick told me that story once, the year we were married. He never told it again. But I remembered it.