Nine Suppers in a Bass Boat
The Cabinets
On Monday morning Rick took a week of vacation he had been saving for deer season.
He and Tyler started tearing out the 1978 cabinets themselves. Rick said there was no reason to pay a contractor to swing a pry bar when he had two good arms and a son. The contractor said fine, he would take a thousand off the quote for demolition.
They carried the old cabinets out to the driveway and stacked them where the boat had been. Duane came over with his trailer to haul them to the dump. Lyle brought a cooler of pop. Marlys brought her lawn chair.
On Tuesday afternoon, Tyler took down the last upper cabinet over the refrigerator. He handed me what was inside it.
It was my coffee can. The kitchen can. A big red Folgers can with a slot I had cut in the plastic lid six years ago, the week I set up the transfer.
I had started it for the little things. Loose change, the odd dollar. Money for a new set of canisters, or a rug, when the kitchen was finally done. I dropped coins through the slot and never opened it, because I wanted it to be a surprise to myself.
It was heavier than I remembered.
I sat down on the floor of my gutted kitchen with my back against the wall and took the lid off.
Under a layer of quarters and dimes, the can was packed with twenty dollar bills. Folded in half, then in half again, small enough to fit through the slot. Hundreds of them.
I started counting, because I count money for a living, and that is what my hands know to do. Tyler sat down beside me and helped me stack them.
Three hundred and twelve twenties. Six thousand, two hundred and forty dollars.
Rick was standing in the doorway with a pry bar in his hand. He did not come in.
“Every Friday,” he said quietly. “Since the week you cut that slot. I’d stop on the way to the truck in the morning.”
“For six years?”
“Storm pay mostly. A little out of my lunch money.” He looked at the floor. “I never said anything because I didn’t know how. You’d have told me we couldn’t afford it.”
“We couldn’t,” I said.
“I know.” He finally looked up. “I figured someday you’d open it and it’d be a good day.”
I sat there on that floor with six thousand dollars in folded twenties all around me, the floor still gritty from the old linoleum, and I cried harder than I had cried in nine nights, harder than I had cried the day the boat came.
This was the same man. The man who bought a bass boat with my kitchen and the man who slipped a twenty in a coffee can every Friday for six years and never once said a word. I had been married to both of them for thirty-two years.
Rick set the pry bar down 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 in a boat for nine days,” I said.
“No, you’re not.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not.”
He put his arm around me, and we sat on the floor in the bare kitchen among all those twenties until Tyler hollered in that Duane was here with the trailer again.