Big Cherry Holler - Adriana Trigiani [41]
“Honey, this is Karen Bell from Coeburn. This is my wife, Ave Maria,” Jack says to her matter-of-factly.
“What a pretty name.”
“Thank you.”
“She’s Italian,” my husband tells her. I guess he’s explaining my name.
“Yeah, I’m just plain old Karen. There’s a million of them out there,” she says, and shrugs.
My mind races: the name Karen. I’ve heard that before. The Pharmacy? A Karen called Jack at the Pharmacy, before I went to Knoxville! Why do I feel as though I’ve caught my husband doing something wrong?
Karen Bell wears a blue-and-tan-plaid pleated skirt and a sweater set in soft blue, a shell with a cardigan over it. She is carrying a clipboard and has a pencil tucked behind her ear (all business). She is much smaller than she appeared to be at the carnival. She’s one of those women a man could carry around like a doll. And the way she moves, she comes at you one piece at a time, reminding me of the goatherd girl marionette my father sent Etta from Italy. Every movement is deliberate.
“Karen’s our supplier.”
“Supplier?” I guess I say this in a funny way because she laughs.
“I supply the aggravation,” she says.
“That must be expensive.”
“Depends.” She looks at me for the first time. Or maybe she just sees me for the first time. She slides one hip onto one of the horses and perches there. Then she rubs a pencil between her palms; it clacks against her rings. (But not one of them is a wedding band.)
“Karen is a salesperson for Luck’s Lumber,” Jack tells me.
“Yeah, that’s how we met,” she says.
How we met? What an odd phrase for a salesperson to use. “Did Jack ever tell you how we met?” I say, wrapping my arms around him.
“No, he didn’t.”
“In kindergarten.”
“That’s so cute. Childhood sweethearts,” Karen says, not meaning it.
“Not really,” I tell her.
“Let’s say we got together later in life,” Jack adds.
“Not too late, though.” I pick up a hammer and hit my open palm with it. I do this a few times before Jack takes it away from me.
“Jack, do you want to take one last look at these blueprints?” Karen is asking him the question, but she’s looking at me politely, like “Could you get out of the way? We’ve got business here.”
“Sorry. I interrupted. You guys go ahead. Do your business thing,” I say nicely, and go off to the far wall to examine my husband’s Sheetrock technique. I lean against the radiator to get a closer look, placing my hand on it—it’s actually very hot, and I think I now have third-degree burns on my palm. But I don’t scream, I just shove my hot hand into my pocket.
Karen unrolls the blueprints, which, out of the corner of my eye, look like complicated geometry to me. How hard is it to take down walls and put them back up again to reconfigure a kitchen? From the size of the blue paper and the series of complicated intersecting chalk lines: very. I watch as Karen, capable and professional, shows Jack and Mousey how things are to be done. What they need. How they can save on insulation. What size wood they need to lengthen the counter space in the kitchen. My husband listens carefully to what she is saying. She makes sense when he challenges her with a good question. Respect washes across his face when she comes up with a solution to a problem he couldn’t solve until she stepped in. She taps her foot and continues to roll a pencil between her hands. She has given this project a lot of thought. This is a woman with follow-through. She always has a plan.
“Well, I guess I’d better get back to the office.” Karen rolls up the blueprints. She looks over at me as if to say, “Okay, he’s all yours. You can talk about what he wants for dinner, what time the PTA meeting starts, and does he need new underwear.” The boring stuff that wives do, not the fascinating stuff of blueprints, raw materials, architecture, and construction—the stuff of Karen Bell.
She tucks the prints under her arm like a baton and walks across the room to her coat, dangling on a nail. Mousey watches her as she goes. She’s got one of those walks where her rear end makes a complete circle as she moves. Smart and Sexy, just