The Half a Kitchen I Paid For

What I Will Admit

I’m trying to tell this straight, so I’ll tell you this part too.

Part of me wanted him to see it. Every morning, when he came in for coffee. Every night, when he walked through to bed. I wanted him to stand in that room and see exactly what was his and what was mine.

I don’t think that part of me was very Christian. I prayed about it at church, in the pew we’ve sat in since we married, and I didn’t get an answer I liked.

But I wasn’t trying to punish him, either. If I had been, I’d have paid for nothing at all and let him live in a gutted kitchen alone. I live in that house. I cook in that kitchen. Half seemed like the honest share of a woman who lived there and didn’t own it.

Rod said he’d finish his side himself. He said it the first week, and again the second. He drove to the lumberyard in Blue Earth once and came home with nothing.

February and March

February went by. Then March.

The refrigerator stood in the dining room next to the card table, humming. The range sat out there too, on a temporary line Rod ran from the panel and checked twice. Thirty one years around electricity, and he does it right.

I made supper on my half every night. I’d set the pan on the stove in the dining room, then carry it to my counter to plate it up. I rinsed the dishes in my sink and put them in my dishwasher and dried them and stacked them on my counter, because there were no cupboards on his side to put them in.

We were kind to each other. That’s the strange thing. We watched the Wild together. He brought me coffee in the morning before my route. He rubbed my feet on Sunday nights, like always.

But neither of us said the word will again. Not once in two months.

Rod spent a lot of time in the garage. He fixed the snowblower that didn’t need fixing. He sharpened every tool he owned. Some nights I’d look out and see the light on at eleven o’clock, and him just sitting on a bucket by the space heater.

I found out later that he called Jill once, in the middle of February. He sat in the truck in the driveway with the engine running and called her in Mankato. She said he talked about the weather for twenty minutes and then said, well, I’d better let you go, and hung up.

He never told her about the kitchen. He never told any of them.

The Recipe Tin

One Saturday in March, I got Karen’s tin down from my closet. I don’t know why that day. Maybe because the new kitchen was the first thing in that house that had nothing of hers in it, and that bothered me more than I expected.

I sat at my new counter and went through the cards. Hot dish. Scotcheroos. Bars for every funeral and graduation in Faribault County. A rhubarb cake with a note in the corner: Jill’s favorite, double the topping.

Her handwriting got shakier toward the back. The last card was for chicken noodle soup, and it was barely legible. I think she wrote it for Rod, after she couldn’t stand at the stove anymore.

I put the cards back in order. I washed the tin and dried it, and I put it in the top drawer on my side, the drawer right next to the sink. It looked small in there. It looked like it belonged.