This chapter is a sample, written to show what a finished page looks like. Margaret and Ray are not real people. Every real chapter is the storyteller’s own words, transcribed and edited for spelling and flow only.
3. The hardware store
How did you meet, and when did you know?
Your grandfather sold me the wrong size of screws. That is the whole story and he would tell it the same way. I had come into Berg’s Hardware for number eight wood screws to fix a bookshelf, and Ray, who had been working there four months and did not yet know where anything was, gave me number sixes with great confidence. I came back the next day to exchange them and he apologized so thoroughly that I asked him if he wanted to get coffee, mostly to make him stop.
That was March of 1972. He was twenty-three, I was twenty-one, and he had the worst haircut I had ever seen on a man, which he blamed on his mother. We had coffee at the Lantern and he talked about the Twins for forty minutes and I decided I did not like him. Then he walked me to the bus and waited until it came, in the rain, with no hat, and I decided I did.
When did I know? Not at the bus. It was later that spring. My father was in the hospital with his heart, the first time, and Ray drove me there every evening after his shift and sat in the parking lot with a book so he would not be in the way. He never came in unless I asked. He did that for eleven days. On the twelfth I asked him to come in, and my father, who was not an easy man, shook his hand and said, “You’re the one with the screws.” Ray said, “Yes, sir.” I knew then.
We were married the next June. The bookshelf is still in your mother’s house, and it still leans.
7. The winter the pipes froze
Tell me about a hard year, and how you got through it.
1979. Ray had been laid off from the plant in October and we had two children under five and a house we had bought eighteen months before with every dollar we had and some we did not. In January the furnace quit and then the pipes in the north wall froze, and I remember standing in the kitchen in my coat at six in the morning with the baby, looking at a bulge in the plaster, and thinking very clearly: this is the bottom. It was not, as it turned out, but it felt like it.
What got us through was not one thing. It was Ray’s brother, who lent us four hundred dollars and never mentioned it again. It was my mother, who took the children two days a week so I could clean houses, which I had sworn I would never do and which I did for two years. It was the man from the gas company who, when he saw the children, put us on a payment plan that I am fairly sure did not exist.
And it was Ray, who got up every morning and looked for work as though it were a job, in a suit, with a thermos, and came home and did not talk about it, and then one night in March sat down at the table and cried, which I had never seen. I did not say anything. I put my hand on his neck. The next week he got on at the county, which is where he stayed for twenty-six years.
I tell you this because you will have a year like that. Everyone does. The thing to know is that it is a year, not a life, and that you will be helped by people you have not yet thought to ask.
Two of fifty-two. The questions that drew these out are in the library every storyteller gets, and the family can swap any coming week for one of their own.