I didn’t find out about what happened on the seventh night until later.
Rick told me himself. After it was all over. Sitting at a kitchen table that was finally back in the kitchen.
Duane came by early that day. Around four o’clock, while I was still at the bank.
Rick was out in the garage with the boat trailer, putting air in that low tire.
Duane Becker has a boat too. A twenty-year-old aluminum fishing boat he keeps in the pole shed out at his place. He and Rick and Lyle have fished out of it a hundred times.
Duane’s wife was named Joanne.
She died three winters ago. Cancer. I’d known Joanne since we were both on the PTA at the grade school. A sweet, round, laughing woman who made the best scotcheroos in Story County and never complained about one single thing in her whole life.
Duane sat down on an upside-down five-gallon bucket in our garage and watched Rick fill that tire.
Then he said, “Joanne wanted a new kitchen.”
Rick stopped what he was doing.
“Twenty years she wanted it,” Duane said. “Had a picture out of a magazine taped up inside the cupboard door. Right by the coffee filters. A white kitchen with blue tile.”
He turned his cap over in his hands.
“Every spring, I said next year. There was always something. A combine part. A new pickup. A new motor for the boat.”
He looked down at the concrete floor.
“She cooked on that old stove right up until she couldn’t stand up at it anymore.”
Rick told me he couldn’t think of one single thing to say.
“I took that picture down after the funeral,” Duane said. “I’ve still got it. It’s in my billfold.”
He stood up off the bucket.
“That’s all I came to say, Rick. I’ll see you at supper.”
And Duane did come to supper that night. He ate my ham and scalloped potatoes in the boat like nothing had happened. He talked about the Cubs.
But Rick didn’t say one word all through supper.
He just kept looking at me. Across that tablecloth.
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