The Canoe in Room Six

The Questions

On the Wednesday after, Travis Kuehn drove up to our house in a pickup with a bad muffler and sat in my driveway for four minutes before he came to the door.

I was on the porch shelling peas. When he finally got out, he took off his cap and held it, and no man in this world looks so much like a boy as a forty-one-year-old with a cap in his hands.

“Mrs. Alvord,” he said. “I need to ask you something strange.”

“Sit down, Travis. Have a pea.”

He sat on the porch step. He didn’t touch the peas.

“The Boat,” he said. “The canoe. What color was the cushion?”

“Yellow. Duck cloth. I sewed it myself.”

“What did the lamp look like?”

“A little brass clip lamp with a green shade. It came from the Ben Franklin store before it closed.” I stopped shelling. “Travis, why are you asking me this?”

“Just curious.”

“You are a terrible liar, Travis Kuehn. You were terrible at eight.”

The next morning the phone rang. A young woman’s voice said, “Mrs. Alvord? It’s Jolene Pruess. I was in your class in 2002.”

I remembered her. A small, solemn girl, missing both front teeth, who ate her lunch in the Boat for three weeks one October and would not say why. Jolene was thirty-one now, a nurse at Kimble Regional.

“I just have a question about the cabinet,” she said. “What was in it? Exactly?”

I told her.

That was how it went for ten days. Travis Nygaard, Orrin’s grandson, who farms eleven hundred acres of wheat and sunflowers west of town, stopped me in the parking lot of the Cenex and asked, with great seriousness, whether Everett still had the saw.

“He does,” I said.

“Good. Tell him he might need it Friday week.”

“Friday week what?”

“Nothing, Mrs. Alvord. Go on home.”

The Card

The card came on the third of September, in a cream envelope with a handwritten address.

It was from Abby Sundby.

I had met her once, in the grocery store, a tall, red-haired girl of twenty-four with her hair in a clip and a cart full of laminating sheets. She had said, “Mrs. Alvord, I’m so glad to meet you,” and I had said the same and meant it.

Inside was a note on plain paper.

Dear Mrs. Alvord, Open house night is Friday the twelfth at 6:30. I would be honored if you would come to Room 6. I know it may be hard. Please come anyway. I think you will want to. Abby

And under that, in smaller writing, as if she had added it at the last minute: Please don’t bring anything. We have everything.

I showed it to Everett. He read it twice with his glasses pushed up on his forehead, and there was something in his face I had not seen in a month. It was nearly a smile.

“You’d best wear the blue dress,” he said.

“Ev. What do you know?”

“Nothing,” my husband said, who has never lied to me in forty-one years and was not good at starting. “I’m a retired man who runs a saw. Wear the blue dress, Corrie.”

I wore the blue dress.