Eleven Wives at the Ribbon Cutting

The week the phone never rang

Here is what you need to know about Gene Lutz, because it matters to the rest of this.

He was not a monster. For most of the fourteen years Dave worked for him, he was a decent boss.

Gene started the shop in 1991 in a steel building out on the highway, with two table saws and a used panel saw he bought from a high school shop class.

By the time Dave hired on, there were eleven men and a waiting list of customers.

He paid on time. He brought donuts on the first Friday of every month.

When our daughter Megan was born early and spent nine days in the hospital in Iowa City, Gene sent a ham to the house and told Dave not to come back until she came home.

He gave out pins. Five years, ten years, fourteen years, a little brass square with a dovetail joint stamped on it.

Dave pretended they were silly. He kept every one of them in the top drawer of his dresser, in a cough drop tin.

So when Gene stopped answering his phone, a lot of men in our town did not know what to think.

Some of them were angry right away. Dave was not. Dave was hurt, which is worse, and harder to get over.

On Saturday he drove out to Gene’s place on the gravel road north of town. Gene’s wife, Joanne, came to the door in her robe. She looked like she had not slept either.

“He can’t talk to anybody right now, Dave,” she said. “I’m sorry. He’s not well.”

Dave told me later that he almost said something sharp to her. He did not.

He told her to tell Gene he hoped he felt better, and he got back in the truck. That is the kind of man I married.

On Monday the men met at the public library because it has computers and it is warm.

Ronnie’s wife, Tammy, works the front desk there, and she helped them find the wage claim form on the Iowa Workforce Development website.

All eleven of them filed. Dave printed his copy and brought it home and put it under the magnet on the refrigerator, next to Megan’s volleyball schedule.

On Tuesday he called the labor office in Des Moines to make sure the claim had gone through. A woman there was kind to him. She said it had.

She also said, plainly, that a claim against a business that has closed its doors could take months to settle, and longer if there was nothing left to collect from.

“Months,” Dave said, when he hung up. He said it to the refrigerator. “She said months.”

People ask me why we did not just get a lawyer. I asked that too.

Dave called the one lawyer in town, who was honest enough to tell him a lawsuit would cost more than two weeks of wages, and that it would take longer than the state.

Our rent was eight hundred and fifty dollars, due on the first. We paid March out of the savings account that was supposed to be Megan’s car fund.

When I balanced the book that night, there were two hundred and twelve dollars left in it.

I make fifteen dollars and forty cents an hour in the school kitchen, and I do not get paid over spring break.

I did that math too. I did it more than once, at the kitchen table after Dave went to bed.