Chapter 4 - The Kitchen Table
We reached our house on the north bench of Spokane Valley at three in the morning.
It was a single-story clapboard house built in 1952, painted white with dark green trim that I had scraped and repainted every five years since we bought it from an old railroad engineer named Gunderson. The yard was two lots wide, filled with Elaine’s apple trees—transparent yellow apples that were good for sauce and winter pies—and an old iron clothesline that stretched between two T-posts made of rail steel.
The house was cold. I turned the thermostat up to sixty-eight, then went down the cellar stairs to check the coal-stoker furnace that Henry and I had converted to natural gas back in the nineties. The burner lit with a soft, hollow whoosh, and within five minutes, the cast-iron radiators along the baseboards began their familiar, rhythmic ticking—clink, clatter, clink—like old men cracking their knuckles before breakfast.
I helped Elaine into the bathroom.
I ran four inches of hot water into the clawfoot tub, dumped half a box of Epsom salts into the stream, and knelt on the bathmat while she stripped off her dress.
Her knee was worse than she had admitted on the highway.
The right joint was the size of a grapefruit, the skin stretched tight and shiny, dark purple around the patella where the flagstone had taken the impact. The mud had dried into gray cakes along her calf, clinging to the fine white hairs on her skin.
"Sit down on the stool, Ellie," I said.
I took a washcloth—a worn yellow terrycloth that had seen fifty bleach cycles—and soaked it in the hot water. I started at her ankle, wiping the dried dirt away with slow, circular strokes, working my way up toward the bruise.
She didn't make a sound. She kept her fingers buried in my hair, her thumbs stroking the back of my neck where the hair was getting thin and gray above my collar.
"You shouldn't have torn the checks, Artie," she whispered.
"I had to," I said, wringing the gray water into the porcelain basin. "If I had handed them to Marcus Vance, it would have meant that I agreed with them. It would have meant that I agreed that my wife was worth less than forty thousand dollars of lace."
"It was Daniel’s chance," she said. Her voice didn't have any anger in it; it had that dull, flat weight of a mother who has watched her child drop an egg on the floor and knows that no amount of sweeping will put the yolk back into the shell. "He wanted so badly to be one of them, Artie. Since he was twelve years old and went to that summer camp with the boys from the country club. He’d come home and look at our furniture, and he wouldn't say anything, but I could see him measuring the space between our lives and theirs."
"He was measuring with a broken rule, Ellie."
"I know," she sighed. She leaned her head back against the white tile wall, closing her eyes as the steam rose around her face. "I know he was. But it’s hard for a boy when he thinks he’s the only one who can see the cracks in the plaster."
I finished washing her leg, dried it with a clean towel, and rubbed three fingers of wintergreen liniment into the joint until the skin turned pink and warm. I wrapped the knee in an elastic bandage, pinned it with two silver clips, and helped her into her flannel nightgown—the blue one with the small white roses that her sister had sent from Wisconsin three Christmases ago.
I put her to bed with three pillows under her foot and two aspirins from the bottle in the medicine cabinet.
"Sleep, Ellie," I said, kissing her forehead.
"Are you coming to bed?"
"In a little while," I said. "I have some paperwork to sort out in the kitchen before the sun comes up."
I walked down the hallway to the kitchen.
The kitchen table was four feet by six feet, made of four-inch edge-glued maple that had come out of an old bowling alley in Coeur d'Alene. It had scorch marks from hot canning kettles, a dark round ring where a bottle of muriatic acid had leaked through a newspaper in nineteen-eighty-four, and hundreds of tiny indentations where Daniel had practiced his geometry homework with a steel compass when he was in the eighth grade.
I sat down in my captain's chair.
I pulled my checkbook from my suit coat, which was hanging over the back of the pantry door, along with my steel-cased calculator and the leather ledger that contained the accounts payable for Miller Machine & Tool.
I opened the ledger.
We owed eighteen thousand dollars to Ryerson Steel for thirty bars of cold-finished chrome moly. We owed four thousand two hundred to the state industrial insurance fund. We had thirty-eight thousand dollars in the operating account at Washington National, and twenty-two thousand in our personal savings—the money we had kept untouched since the day we paid off the shop’s mortgage in two thousand twelve.
The line of credit for the four acres—the one Daniel had tried to claim under his fraudulent power of attorney—was intact.
I had never executed the draw.
When Daniel had come to the house in June, begging for the money to secure the venue, I had gone to the bank in Spokane and had the manager issue the certified drafts against a personal demand note secured by the machinery in Bay Two—the two five-axis Mori Seiki mills that Henry and I had bought used from an aerospace contractor in Boeing’s surplus auction.
The land had never been touched.
The land was three miles north of the river, sixty acres of ponderosa pine and rocky basalt benches where the wild turkeys nested in the spring and the snow stayed two weeks longer than it did in the valley.
My phone vibrated against the maple table.
It was five-fifteen in the morning.
The caller ID showed a local Spokane number—the direct line to the night dispatcher at the Union Pacific rail yard.
I clicked the button.
"Miller," I said.
"Arthur? It’s Pete down at the yard."
"Morning, Pete. What’s off the track?"
"Nothing’s off the track, Arthur," Pete said. His voice was raspy from twenty years of diesel fumes and black coffee. "I got a flatcar sitting on Siding Four that was supposed to be spotted at your crane spur at six AM. Thirty-two tons of structural wide-flange beams from the mill in Pueblo."
I frowned, looking at my master calendar on the wall beside the refrigerator. "The Pueblo steel wasn't scheduled until the third of next month, Pete."
"Well, it’s here now," Pete grunted. "And the shipping manifest has an expedited delivery order signed by Daniel Miller out of the Seattle office. He marked it Urgent — Priority Commercial Staging for Montgomery Infrastructure LLC."
A cold wind seemed to blow through the warm kitchen, right through the floorboards, straight up through the soles of my wool socks.
"Montgomery Infrastructure?" I asked.
"Yeah," Pete said. "Richard Montgomery’s development company. The outfit that’s doing the new logistics terminal down by the airport. Daniel had the freight billed to your commercial rail account, Arthur. Twelve thousand four hundred dollars in demurrage and switching fees."
Pete paused. He cleared his throat.
"Arthur... the billing address on the freight bill isn't your shop. It’s a post office box in Bellevue. But the credit authorization has your federal employer identification number on the line."
I looked at the maple table. I looked at the tiny indentations where my son had learned how to draw an equilateral triangle with a steel point and a pencil.
"Pete," I said.
"Yeah, Arthur?"
"Don't spot that car on my spur."
"Where do you want it?"
"Leave it on Siding Four," I said. "Put a blue flag on the coupler, lock the derail, and tell the morning yardmaster that the billing is contested under Section Nine of the Interstate Commerce Act."
Pete was silent for five seconds. A diesel horn blew two miles away down the valley, a low, lonely two-note blast that echoed off the hills.
"Contested?" Pete asked quietly. "Arthur... if I flag that car, the rail police will have an inspector down here by noon. It’s an interstate shipment. If the billing is fraudulent, they don't mess around with civil letters. They impound the paper."
"Tell them to impound it, Pete," I said. "And tell the inspector I’ll have the coffee on when he gets here."
May you like
I hung up.
I sat in the gray light of the kitchen as the sun began to hit the peaks of Mount Spokane, watching the steam rise from the hot water heater in the corner, feeling the heavy, cold certainty of a man who knows that the hardest part of cutting steel isn't the force you put on the wheel—it’s knowing when to pull your hand back before the blade takes your fingers with it.
