Free Love Me by Garrison Keillor

start living the good life.”
    “I have a good life, thank you very much.”
    “I’m trying to tell you something. Work with me on this. Our ship came in. Our prayers were answered. We won the lottery, Iris. The Lord has blessed us. Mightily. Rained down blessings. Don’t turn your back on a gift. Don’t leave the harvest sitting on the dock. Why live like this if we don’t have to?”
    “I like this house. What’s wrong with it?”
    “Plenty.”
    “Then let’s work together and make it what we want it to be.”
    “I did. I worked and wrote a book—”
    “If you’re thinking about moving up there—” she cocked her head at Ramsey Hill and Summit Avenue—“forget it. I am not going to spend my life putting on dinner parties and sucking up to a bunch of people from hoity-toi schools and their Junior League wingdings, no thank you. I am not a clotheshorse. I want no part of that. You want that, go marry somebody who looks good in black.”
    My wife. A good woman. Some women if they were held hostage in a dank dungeon for three months and fed swill in buckets and you rescued them and brought them to the Ritz and a lovely lunch awaited and new clothes from Saks, they would say, “This coffee isn’t Starbucks! And I despise scallops. And whatever made you think I would wear that shade of gray?” Iris is a believer in Good Enough. I respect that. I happen to want something better.
    She said, “I spent the past eight years trying to make this a neighborhood that anybody can be proud to live in and why would I want to walk out on it now?”
    “Think of us as Ma and Pa Joad, heading for the orange groves. Think children of Israel in bondage in Egypt.”
    “I don’t know where you get your ideas. You’ve got money? Fine. Put it in the bank. Don’t throw it away on stuff we don’t need. That kind of stuff will come back to bite you in the ass real quick.” And she went back to cleaning out rocks and glass shards so she could put in flowers.
    I opened the garage door. Full of grocery carts she was storing for crazy people locked up in nursing homes. Crazy people have the same right as anyone else to own worthless junk, so Iris offers free parking. Thirty-seven of them with garbage bags full of little treasures moldering away. She knew each one by name: Harry, John, Wally, Evelyn, Maxine, Luverne, Don, Agnes, Sheila, like a herd of dairy cows. I offered her sunny afternoons on the terrace and she preferred to be the custodian of lost minds. I was proud of her. And at the same time I wanted to shake her. I have never wanted to shake somebody so much as right then.
    She said, “I’m going to clean that garage out. It’s on my list of things to do.”
    “I’ll call a garbage hauler to come clean it for you. Let’s go out to dinner.”
    “I’ve got supper already started. Bob and Sandy are coming over. I made my bean dish.”
    Iris is not a gourmet person. I knew this when I married her. Any recipe with the words marinate or tie up spices in cheesecloth —forget it. Fry up some bacon, brown the ground meat and the onions, pour in some ketchup and Worcestershire, add brown sugar and mustard and vinegar, dump in a few cans of beans—kidney, lima, butter, navy, brown beans—and bake for forty minutes and you’ve got your dinner. Iris’s Not So Bad Beans. After all these years, I know my beans. Maybe my problem is an allergic reaction to legumes.
    I tried putting it to her directly. “I am a successful author, babes. I have a number one best-selling book and a quarter million in hand, and I wish to celebrate. Is this wrong? Why can’t you call Sandy and Bob and tell them it’s off tonight? You knew I was coming home tonight. Let’s go out to dinner. You and me. I thought you’d be glad to see me.”
    “I am,” she said. “I just don’t see why I’m supposed to put on a big whoop-de-doo just because you come home.”
    I explained that I need rewards. I suggested that we keep the house and buy a