Eleven Wives at the Ribbon Cutting

The idea

I did not sleep much that night. I lay there listening to the furnace kick on and off and thinking about the chamber of commerce.

I know how those ribbon cuttings go, because I have been to a few. The chamber president gives a little speech. The mayor shakes hands.

Somebody from the Courier takes a picture of the owner with the big scissors, and it runs on the front page the next week.

Everybody claps. Everybody has a cookie. Everybody goes home, and the picture hangs in a frame by the register for twenty years.

I thought about that picture for a long time. Then I got up at four, made a pot of coffee, and sat at the kitchen table with our church directory and the list of the men’s names that Dave had written on the back of the wage claim.

I knew most of the wives. We had sat together at the shop Christmas party at the Legion hall every December for years.

We had brought hot dishes to each other when somebody had a baby or a parent died.

When Dave came into the kitchen at a quarter to six out of habit, even with nowhere to go, I told him what I was thinking. I told him all of it.

“No,” he said. “Absolutely not.”

He sat down across from me. He did not raise his voice. Dave never raises his voice. He just put both hands flat on the table like he does when he is about to measure something twice.

“I won’t have you women standing out on Main Street fighting my fight,” he said. “That’s not how I do things. That’s not how any of those guys do things.”

“It’s not your fight,” I said. “It’s our rent. It’s Megan’s car money. It’s eleven kitchen tables. And nobody is going to fight anybody.”

I told him my rules. No signs. No shouting. Not one word to anybody, not to Kyle, not to the mayor, not to the paper.

We would wear our church dresses, and each of us would hold her husband’s last pay stub, the one from the last check that cleared, and we would stand there.

“And then what?” he said.

“And then Kyle gets to decide what kind of man he is,” I said. “In front of the whole town. That’s all.”

Dave looked at me for a long time. Then he got up, poured himself a cup of coffee, and went out to the garage without a word. I heard the saw start up.