The Room Over Haskins Hardware
I did not plan to make a show of it. I picked eight on a Friday morning because Main Street would be quiet, and because Travis was on nights and would be asleep.
I told Walt on Thursday I would be there at eight. He nodded. “I’ll have the door open,” he said.
That Thursday night, before his shift, Travis stood in the kitchen doorway with his lunch cooler and his thermos. He looked at me a long time, like he wanted to say something.
“You’re quiet,” he said.
“I’m tired,” I said. That was true too.
He set his cooler down and kissed my forehead, the way he always did before nights. Then he went out to the truck, and I watched his taillights turn onto Main.
I wrote him a note and tore it up. I wrote another one. In the end it said only, “I moved my desk to the room over Haskins Hardware. I’m not leaving you. I’ll be home at five. I love you. K.”
I put it under the salt shaker, where the check had been. Then I carried my monitors and headset and space heater out to my car. The space heater was mine.
Friday came up bright and cold. There had been a hard frost, and the maples along Third Street had dropped half their leaves overnight. The whole yard was yellow.
Travis got home at six-forty. I heard the truck, then the bathroom, then the bedroom door and the box fan coming on. He did not go into the kitchen. He did not see the note.
At seven-thirty, I put on my mustard yellow sweater and my jeans and twisted my long light brown hair up into a messy bun.
I got the hand truck under the desk, tipped it back, and strapped it. I bumped it down the porch steps one at a time, holding my breath for the bedroom window.
He did not wake up. If he did, he did not come out.
The first block was easy. A man walking a beagle lifted his coffee cup at me and kept going, like a woman pushing a desk was an everyday thing.
Then I turned onto Main.
Our Main Street is old brick, the buildings two stories, with the dates carved up in the cornices. The sidewalks are brick too, in places, heaved up by tree roots and a hundred Iowa winters.
The hand truck did fine for three blocks. Then I hit the stretch in front of the bank, where the sidewalk rolls like a creek bed, and one wheel caught and the whole thing lurched sideways.
I got it stopped. I stood there in the yellow leaves, breathing hard. Pickups were parked along the curb.
I unstrapped the desk and set it on its legs. I would walk it the rest of the way, end over end.
Lift one end, swing it forward, set it down. It is how my grandfather moved things.
It was slow and it was loud. The legs scraped the brick every time.
A woman came out of the café with a to-go cup and stood watching. A man I knew from church came out behind her.