“It still works fine, Karen.”
My husband said it standing in our driveway on a Saturday afternoon in late April. His hand was resting on the side of a bass boat that had not been there when I left for the grocery store.
It was green and silver metal flake. The kind that sparkles like a bowling ball under the lights at the alley. There was a 150 Mercury motor hung on the back of it, and a trailer underneath with one tire lower than the other.
I had a gallon of milk in one hand and a ten-pound sack of potatoes in the other.
I just stood there holding them. I didn’t know where else to put them.
“What works fine?” I said.
“The kitchen.”
Rick didn’t look at me. He looked at the boat.
“The cabinets close. The stove heats. My mother cooked on worse for forty years.”
That was when I understood exactly where the money had come from.
My name is Karen Schmitz. I’m fifty-three years old. I’ve been a teller at the First State Bank in Cambridge, Iowa, for twenty-two years.
And for six years, I put forty dollars a week from my paycheck into a savings account we called the kitchen account.
Forty dollars. Every single Friday. I set it up as an automatic transfer so I couldn’t talk myself out of it.
Some weeks I had to move the money back out. The fall Tyler was twenty and his transmission went. The winter the water heater died and flooded the basement. But I always caught it back up.
By that April, the balance sat at eleven thousand and twelve dollars.
I knew the number because I’m a bank teller. I count other people’s money for a living. And I’d counted mine every Friday on my lunch break for six years. Sitting in my car in the bank parking lot with a ham sandwich, looking at that number on my phone.
The contractor’s quote was hanging on our refrigerator under a magnet shaped like an ear of corn.
Eleven thousand dollars even.
New oak cabinets. A laminate countertop. A brand-new range where all four burners actually worked. And labor.
Our kitchen was put in when the house was built in 1978. Dark brown cabinets with doors that sagged on their hinges. A stove with exactly one burner that worked, and it only worked on high.
So every pot of gravy I’d made for thirty-two years, I’d made standing over it with a wooden spoon. Stirring and stirring so it wouldn’t scorch.
“Where did you get the money, Rick?” I asked.
I already knew.
“I got a cashier’s check yesterday,” he said. “At the branch over in Nevada.”
He finally looked at me.
“I knew better than to do it at your window.”
At least he was honest about that part.
It was a joint account. He had every right in the world to take that money out. And the girl at the Nevada branch had every reason to hand it to him.
“Who sold it to you?”
“Fella from Story City. He’s moving down by his daughter in Missouri. He had the papers all ready.”
Rick rubbed the back of his neck.
“He’s gone already, Karen. He left this morning.”
So that was that.
There was no taking it back. No one to call. No store to return it to. The man and my eleven thousand dollars were somewhere on Interstate 35, heading south toward Kansas City.
I set the milk down on the hood of my car.
I set the potatoes down next to it.
“Well,” I said. “Thank you for telling me.”
He blinked at me like I’d spoken a foreign language.
I think he’d been ready for me to cry. Or to throw something. Or to march into the house and slam the screen door so hard the glass rattled.
I didn’t do any of that.
I picked my groceries back up, went inside, and started supper.
I made pot roast. Because it was Saturday. And that’s what I make on Saturday.
Carrots and potatoes in the roasting pan with it. Onions underneath. Gravy over the one burner that worked on high, standing there stirring.
At ten minutes to six, I went to the hall closet and took out a tablecloth.
Not the everyday one.
The good one. Red and white checks. My mother gave it to me as a wedding present in 1994. I only use it on Thanksgiving and Easter.
Rick was out in the garage, digging through the life jackets he’d bought along with the boat. He didn’t see me carry the first kitchen chair out the front door.
He saw me carry the second one.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“Setting the table,” I said.
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