The Half a Kitchen I Paid For

The Bid on the Table

The kitchen was the last room. Karen’s kitchen. Dark oak cabinets with brass handles, a counter the color of a manila folder, a vinyl floor worn through to the black in front of the sink.

Rod and his son Ben had gutted it the weekend after New Year’s. That was Rod’s idea, to save the contractor’s demolition charge. They took out the cabinets and the counter and the soffits, all the way down to the studs on both walls, and carried it out to a dumpster in the driveway.

Before they started, I emptied every cupboard. That’s how I found Karen’s recipe tin, up in the cupboard over the refrigerator, behind a box of birthday candles. It was dented on one corner and the cards inside were splattered and soft.

I didn’t know what to do with it. It wasn’t mine to throw away and it wasn’t mine to keep. So I wrapped it in a dish towel and put it on the top shelf of my closet, and I told myself I’d figure it out later.

The contractor was a man named Steve Hanson from out by Frost. He’d done the Lutheran church basement and half the kitchens in the county. Rod had him over in December, and the bid came in the mail right after the demolition.

That was the paper Rod tapped at breakfast. Thirty thousand. Half and half. Fifteen thousand each, like we’d split a dinner check.

And it would have been fair, if it had been our house.

What I Decided

I put the will back in the envelope and the envelope back in the drawer, under the seed catalogs, exactly the way I found it. Then I went and sat at the card table we’d set up in the dining room while the kitchen was torn out.

I didn’t cry. I want to be honest about that, too. I think I’d done my crying over a house once already, in 2009, and there wasn’t any more of that particular kind in me.

What I did was think. I’m a bus driver. I think in routes. You figure out where you are and where you have to get to, and what roads are open.

Here is where I came out.

A man can leave his own house to his own children. Whether a court might have given me something anyway, I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to find out. Rod owned that house before he ever met me.

And he had made a promise to a dying woman. I knew it before I read a word, because I knew Rod. He would no more break a promise to Karen than he would climb a pole in a lightning storm.

I was not going to fight that. I was not going to hire somebody in Fairmont and drag his four kids through it. I was not going to make Rod choose between me and his dead wife.

But I was not going to keep paying for something that wasn’t mine, either.