Eleven Wives at the Ribbon Cutting

The side jobs

Dave does not sit still. By Wednesday he had a job building a bathroom vanity for our neighbor, Pat Schroeder, for cash.

By Friday he had a second one lined up, a set of bookshelves for a retired teacher two streets over.

He worked in our unheated garage with his own tools: a contractor saw, a router table he built himself, and a stack of clamps he has been buying one at a time for twenty years at farm auctions.

It was not the same as a paycheck. It was a few hundred dollars here and there, and it was a grown man in his forties working in a garage at night in March with a kerosene heater going and his breath showing.

One night I went out to bring him coffee, and he was not working. He was standing at the bench with the cough drop tin open, holding the fourteen-year pin between his thumb and finger.

“Gene gave me this in January,” he said. “Five weeks ago. Shook my hand in front of everybody. Said I was the best finish man he ever had.”

I did not know what to say, so I did not say anything.

I put the coffee down next to him and stood there with my arm around his waist until he put the pin back in the tin.

I want to be honest about that night, because it is the night I stopped feeling sorry for Gene Lutz.

Up until then, I had been telling myself he was a sick old man who had panicked. After that, I wanted somebody to look at my husband the way I was looking at him.

The notice in the paper

Our town has a weekly paper, the Courier. It comes out on Wednesdays.

There is always a stack of them on the end of the steel counter in the school kitchen, because our head cook, Barb, reads the obituaries out loud during prep.

That Wednesday Barb did not read the obituaries. She went quiet, then slid the paper down the counter to me with her finger on a small box at the bottom of page three.

It was a chamber of commerce notice. Ribbon cutting, Friday, March 13, ten in the morning. A new business on Main Street, in the old Ritter Hardware building. Lutz Custom Cabinetry. Owner, Kyle Lutz.

Kyle is Gene’s son. He is thirty-six. He grew up in that shop, sweeping sawdust in the summers, and when he got older he ran the office side, the estimates and the books and the ordering.

Dave taught him how to run a table saw when he was twenty-two. Dave still talks about it.

He says Kyle was the most careful kid he ever trained, that he never once lost a fingertip or a board.

I read the notice three times. I read it again. Then I folded the paper, put it in my apron pocket, and finished cutting four hundred pieces of breakfast pizza with my hands shaking.

When I got home, Dave was at the table with his own copy. Pat Schroeder had brought it over.

Dave had it open to page three, flat on the oilcloth, with his hand on it like he was trying to keep it from blowing away.

“Two weeks,” he said. “He locked us out two weeks ago, and his boy is opening up on Main Street. Same name on the door.”

“Did you know?” I asked.

“There were rumors,” he said. “Mike heard Kyle had been looking at the Ritter building. I didn’t believe it. I thought it was just talk at the gas station.”

He called Kyle that night. I sat across from him and heard Kyle answer on the second ring.

Dave put him on speaker without asking, which is not something he usually does, so I think he wanted me to hear it.

“Dave,” Kyle said. His voice was tight. “I know why you’re calling. I can’t talk about my dad’s business. That was his company. This is a new company. I’m not supposed to discuss it.”

“Who says you’re not supposed to?” Dave asked.

There was a long pause on the line, long enough that I could hear a television somewhere behind Kyle.

“I’m sorry, Dave,” Kyle said, and he hung up.