The Neighbors Who Filled My Kitchen Table

The coffee can

When I opened the front room door, all three were on my sofa in a row with the last of the plates in their laps, trying to look as though they hadn’t heard a word through the wall.

“Opal,” I said. “Come in the kitchen a minute.”

She came, with her cane, and I went to the cupboard over the refrigerator, the one I need the step stool for, and brought down an old Folgers can.

“Irene, what’s that?”

“Open it.”

She pried the lid off with her thumbnail and looked in. It took her a moment to see.

Eleven envelopes, each in her own handwriting. From O. Reinke, toward the furnace. Every one she had put into my hand, and every one with two hundred dollars still inside. I had never cashed one.

“You said you wanted to pay me back,” I said. “And I knew you’d never rest unless you did, so I let you. I put each one in this can. It’s yours, Opal. It was always going to be yours. And the $1,800 you still owed me, I counted paid the day I wrote the check.”

She stood there holding the can. She is a small woman, and for a moment she looked very small. Her mouth worked. Then it broke, and she cried the way only a woman of eighty-two can, loud and unashamed, with her whole face.

“You old fool,” she said. “You old, old fool.”

“I know it. I should have told you in the spring. That was mine to say, and I didn’t.”

“I have been lying awake over that furnace.”

“I know you have.”

She wiped her face with the heel of her hand and set the can on my counter. She looked at it for some time. “All right. Then here is what I am going to do, and you will not argue. Immanuel’s furnace is forty years old and held together with prayer. I’ll put two hundred in the furnace fund every month until it’s eleven more. That’s my money, and I decide where it goes.”

“It is,” I said. “And you did.”

Evelyn and Nora came in behind her, and the four of us stood and held on to each other in my kitchen at eleven o’clock on a Thursday morning, while the coffee went cold on the table.

Evelyn looked at the bare place on the counter where the pie had been and said she had not had her second piece, and now there was a state man eating it in a gray car.