Nine Suppers in a Bass Boat

The Co-op Crew

On the sixth night the co-op crew drove by.

It was two of the bucket trucks and the digger derrick, coming back from setting a pole out by the county line. They came down our street, which is not on the way to anywhere, slowly, in a line.

The first truck honked twice. The second honked three times. The man driving the digger leaned out his window and hollered, “Save me a plate, Schmitzy!”

Rick put his face in his hands. His ears were bright red. But when he took his hands away, he was grinning.

“They’re never going to let me live this down,” he said.

“No,” I said. “I don’t suppose they are.”

Marlys raised her coffee cup to the trucks as they passed. One of the linemen raised a hand back.

By then people were stopping. Not many. A few cars slowed down. The Lutheran pastor’s wife walked by with her dog twice. A boy on a bicycle circled the cul-de-sac three times and asked if he could sit in the boat after we were done.

I never said a cross word to any of them. I never said a cross word to Rick. Every night I cooked a real supper, set the good tablecloth on the bench seat, lit the Mason jar candle, and 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 about it, because Deb deserved a real answer.

“No,” I said. “I’m trying to show him. If I’d yelled, he’d have yelled back, and the boat would still be in the driveway. This way he has to sit in it.”

“And look at it.”

“And look at me,” I said. “Across the bench. Every night.”

Deb was quiet. Then she said, “You always were the smart one.”

“I’m not smart,” I said. “I’m just tired of cooking gravy on high.”

Duane

I did not know 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, around four, while I was still at the bank. Rick was in the garage with the boat trailer’s low tire, putting air in it.

Duane Becker has a boat too. A twenty-year-old aluminum fishing boat he keeps in a 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. I had known her since the PTA at the grade school, a sweet, round woman who made the best scotcheroos in the county and never complained about anything.

Duane sat on an upside-down 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 inside the cupboard door, by the coffee filters. Every spring I said next year. There was always a combine part. A pickup. A new motor for the boat.” He turned his cap over in his hands. “She cooked on that old stove right up until she couldn’t stand up at it anymore.”

Rick told me he could not think of one thing to say.

“I took the picture down after the funeral,” Duane said. “I’ve still got it. It’s in my billfold.” He got up off the bucket. “That’s all I came to say, Rick. I’ll see you at supper.”

And he did come to supper that night, and he ate my ham and scalloped potatoes in the boat like nothing had happened. But Rick did not say a word all through it. He just kept looking at me across that tablecloth.