Eleven Wives at the Ribbon Cutting

The phone calls

I made the first call at seven that morning, before I left for work, to Deb Ostrander. Deb is sixty-one. Her husband, Larry, had been at the shop twenty-six years, longer than anybody but Gene.

“I’ve been waiting for somebody to do something,” Deb said. “I’ll be there. I’ll wear my good blue.”

The rest were not all that easy. I called from my car in the school parking lot on my lunch break, and from the kitchen table that night, and some of the conversations were hard.

Tammy, Ronnie’s wife, was worried. Ronnie is fifty-three, and there are not many shops within an hour that hire a fifty-three-year-old cabinet man. “If we embarrass them,” she said, “Ronnie might never work in this county again.”

I told her I understood. I told her she did not have to come, and that nobody would think less of her.

She said she would think about it. She called me back at nine that night and said she had told Ronnie, and Ronnie had said, “Go.”

Angie, who is twenty-nine and married to the youngest man in the shop, said yes before I finished the question. Julie said yes.

Michelle said she would have to find somebody to watch her two little ones, and then she called back and said her mother would.

Karen said no at first. Karen’s husband, Tom, had already found a job at a big cabinet plant in Cedar Rapids, an hour’s drive each way, and she said she just wanted to put it all behind them.

Then she called me back Thursday afternoon. “Tom said he’d like me to go,” she said. “He said he was owed that money same as everybody, and he never got to say goodbye to the shop. He said I could say it for him.”

By Thursday night all ten of them had said yes. Eleven women, counting me. Eleven men’s stubs.

Thursday night eight of them came to my kitchen. I made coffee and a pan of scotcheroos, because you cannot have women in an Iowa kitchen without bars. Deb brought a second pan anyway.

I went over the rules again. No signs. No words. Church clothes. Hold the stub in front of you, where it can be seen.

Do not hand it to anybody, not Kyle and not the paper. It is not a bill. It is just the truth, held up.

Michelle asked what we were supposed to do if Kyle came over and started yelling. I said I did not think he would.

I said if he did, we would let him finish, and then we would keep standing there.

Julie asked what we would do if nothing happened. If he just cut the ribbon and went inside.

“Then we go home,” I said. “And we know we did it the decent way.”

I was not being completely honest with them, or with myself. Part of me wanted it to sting.

Part of me wanted Kyle to have that picture in the paper with us in it, whatever he did. I am not proud of that part, but it was there.

Dave came in from the garage while we were cleaning up.

He stood in the doorway with sawdust on his shoulders and looked at all those women at his kitchen table. Some of them he had known for fourteen years.

“If you’re going,” he said, “then the men are going too. We’ll stand at the back. We won’t say anything either. But I’m not having my wife stand out there by herself while I hide in the garage.”

Deb laughed, the first laugh in that kitchen all week. “Larry already said the same thing,” she said. “He’s been ironing his good work shirt since supper.”