The Shower Held by the River

The coffee can

By the end of that shift, a Folgers can was going down the belt. It was passed hand to hand along the stainless steel, between knives and trays, with ones and fives and a twenty folded into a square. Nobody said what it was for. Everybody knew.

At the break, Wendy counted it out on the table. “Hundred and eighty-six,” she said. By the next morning it was two hundred and twelve. A man in maintenance who had never said more than ten words to me left a ten-dollar bill under the can with no note.

The river park office wanted twenty-five dollars to hold the shelter for the afternoon, and Valerie drove over on her lunch to pay it. A woman at the counter told her it was one of the last Saturdays before the county closed the shelters for the cold.

Lucille took the cake. She ordered a white sheet cake from the Kroger bakery, thirty-four dollars, plain white frosting, and she said to leave the top bare because the room would be full of enough words already.

There would be burgoo from Valerie’s mother’s recipe, the real western Kentucky kind, thick enough to stand a spoon in. There would be little smokies in grape jelly and barbecue sauce. Deviled eggs. A pan of green beans cooked all day with a ham hock. A banana pudding from a woman I had spoken to maybe twice.

And Wendy said, “Earl has a crib.”

The crib

Earl is Wendy’s husband, a retired millwright with forearms like fence posts and a barn full of tools he refuses to lend. He heard about it Thursday night and said nothing at all. Wendy told me later that he finished his supper, put his plate in the sink, and walked out to the shop.

His sister had a crib in her attic in Morganfield. Solid oak, nearly forty years old. “It’s a drop-side,” Wendy told me. “Earl said he wouldn’t put a baby in one of those, because they stopped making them for a reason.”

That was why he spent two nights with a belt sander and a hand plane, taking the drop side off and fastening the rail in place for good.

He measured the slats himself, and they came to under two and three-eighths inches apart, which is the rule. He bought new hardware, and a firm new mattress that fit snug against the frame with no gap you could slide two fingers into.

He sanded the oak back to bare wood and stained it a warm honey brown that nearly glowed. When I saw it Saturday, I put both hands over my mouth.

But that was Saturday. Back on Friday night, I did not know about the crib at all, because I was sitting at my own kitchen table with my husband.