Eleven Wives at the Ribbon Cutting

What Kyle said

Dave looked at that hand for a second. I know my husband.

I knew he was thinking about the fourteen years, and about the pin in his pocket, and about the garage at night with the kerosene heater.

Then he shook it. Of course he did. That is Dave.

“I’m sorry,” Kyle said. He did not say it quietly.

He said it loud enough that the people with the coffee could hear it, and I think he meant them to. “Dad told me you guys were taken care of. He told me the bank was settling it out of the equipment. I should have called you myself. I should have called every one of you.”

“You could have answered the phone,” Dave said. He said it gently, but he said it.

“I know,” Kyle said. “I know I could have.”

He let go of Dave’s hand and turned to the other men, all of them, along the curb. Larry. Ronnie. Mike. Tom, who had driven an hour.

He went down the line and shook every hand, and some of those men did not want to shake it at first, and he waited until they did.

Then he came back and stood in front of Dave again.

“You’ll have it by Wednesday,” he said. “All of it. Every one of you. I’ll mail the checks myself.”

“With what money?” Dave asked. It was a fair question, and Kyle took it like one.

“Mine,” Kyle said. “The startup money for this place. It’s going to be a slower start than I planned. That’s all right. I’d rather start slow than start like this.”

Sandy came over then, with her dead microphone, and asked in a small voice if we were still doing the ribbon. Kyle shook his head.

“Not today,” he said. “We’ll do it next Friday. Same time. If these guys will come.”

He looked at the eleven of us on the sidewalk, still holding our stubs. He looked at me last.

I want to say he looked ashamed, and he did, but mostly he looked like a man who had finally put something heavy down.

“Mrs. Graber,” he said. “You can put that away. I know what it says.”

I folded Dave’s stub along its soft creases and put it in my purse. One by one, down the row, the other women did the same. Nobody handed anything to anybody. We just put them away.

The man in the doorway

Gene came to our house on Saturday afternoon.

I was in the kitchen making a meatloaf. I heard a vehicle in the drive and looked out, and it was not Gene’s big red pickup.

It was Joanne’s little car, and Gene was getting out of the passenger side, slowly, holding onto the door.

He looked ten years older than he had at the Christmas party. He was sixty-four, and he looked like an old man for the first time since I had known him.

Dave went out to meet him in the drive. I watched them through the window for a minute, the two of them standing there with their hands in their pockets, not saying anything.

Then I went to the door and told them both to come in before they froze.

I am not going to pretend I wanted Gene Lutz in my kitchen. I did not.

But my mother raised me to put the coffee on when somebody comes to the door, and so I did, and I set out what was left of Deb’s scotcheroos.

Gene sat at our kitchen table and did not touch his coffee for a long time. Then he told us.

The old shop was two hundred thousand dollars in debt.

He had borrowed against the building, then against the equipment, then against his own house, trying to keep it going through two bad years. In February the bank called the note.

“I thought if I put the new place in Kyle’s name,” he said, “at least the family business would go on. My dad was a carpenter. I started that shop with nothing. I thought starting over clean was the only way to save any of it.”

“And the men?” I said. It came out harder than I meant it to.

“I told myself the bank would sell the equipment and there would be enough left for wages,” Gene said. “I told Kyle that. I told myself that. And then I found out there wouldn’t be, and I couldn’t face it. So I stopped answering the phone.”