Eleven Wives at the Ribbon Cutting

Friday morning

I asked Barb for the morning off, and she gave it to me before I finished asking. She said she would cover breakfast herself. She also said, “You give that boy a good long look for me.”

The morning of the thirteenth was cold and gray, the kind of March morning in eastern Iowa when the sky sits right down on the grain elevator and the wind comes straight up Main Street from the river. The sidewalks were still wet from rain in the night.

I wore my navy church dress and the navy cardigan I wear to funerals. I left my coat in the car so the dress would show.

My hair is short and dark blonde, and I had my sister cut it on Wednesday night, because I wanted to look like myself, only neater.

Dave put on a clean work shirt, the tan one, and ironed it on the kitchen table.

Before we left he went to the dresser, opened the cough drop tin, and put the fourteen-year pin in his shirt pocket. He did not pin it on. He just put it in there, over his heart.

We met in the bank parking lot at nine forty. All ten wives came.

Some of them I barely recognized in their good clothes, with their hair done, holding their purses in front of them like they were going to a wedding.

Each of us had a pay stub. Most of them had been folded and unfolded so many times that the creases had gone soft.

Deb had Larry’s in a plastic sleeve, the kind you put a recipe card in.

Mine was Dave’s last stub, dated two weeks before the door was locked. Eighty hours. Twenty-eight seventy-five. Two thousand three hundred dollars gross. I held it by the corner so my thumb would not cover the numbers.

We walked down Main Street together, past the Casey’s and the dentist and the flower shop. Nobody talked.

I could hear our church shoes on the sidewalk, all of us more or less in step, and I could hear the men’s work boots somewhere behind us.

Most of the women wore their good coats over their church dresses. I was the only one in just a cardigan.

There was a red ribbon stretched across the big front window of the old Ritter Hardware building.

The windows had been washed, and through them I could see a bare, empty showroom with nothing in it yet, waiting for its first sample kitchen.

About twenty people were standing on the sidewalk with paper cups of coffee. The chamber president, a nice woman named Sandy who sells insurance, was holding a microphone that was not plugged into anything.

The Courier photographer was there with his camera around his neck. He shoots all the chamber events.

And Kyle was standing behind the ribbon in a blue polo shirt under a dark jacket, holding a big pair of ceremonial scissors, the kind the chamber keeps in a felt box at the bank.