The Furnace Man Came on Monday

Nineteen Winters

It was an old gas furnace, older than our marriage, and it ran off the same propane tank that fed the kitchen range and the water heater. It kept us warm for twenty-two years.

In November of 2007 it started tripping off in the night. Dale called Mr. Kovar, who has done the heating and plumbing for half of Jefferson County since before I could drive. Mr. Kovar took the front panel off, looked in with a mirror and a flashlight for about one minute, and shut the gas valve with his own hand.

“Heat exchanger’s cracked clean through,” he said. “I can’t leave this running, Dale. It’ll put fumes in the house. I’m sorry.”

He wired a red tag to the gas line and wrote the date on it. Then he sat at my kitchen table and figured on the back of a card.

“Thirty-four hundred, put in,” he said. “I can have one here by Friday.”

Dale looked at that card for a long time.

“We’ll have to see,” he said.

That night he sat me down. He had the checkbook open and he showed me the numbers, the way he always did when he wanted me to understand that a thing could not be done. Seed. Fertilizer. Taxes on the quarter section. Trish in her first year at the college in Lincoln.

“Not this year, Bon,” he said. “Maybe after harvest.”

I believed him. I had no reason on earth not to. We were not people with money. Dale farmed a hundred and sixty acres and worked full time at the co-op elevator besides, and I cooked in the kitchen at the nursing home in town, and my check went into the farm account every other Friday like water into sand.

So he hauled the old parlor stove out of the barn and set it in the kitchen, and he said it was just for the one winter.

Here is what nineteen winters looks like.

It looks like plastic on every window, put up in October with a roll of tape and my hair dryer, and taken down in April with the paint coming off on the tape.

It looks like a quilt nailed across the stairway door, because we closed off the upstairs that first winter and never opened it again. Our bedroom has been the dining room since 2007. My good table has been in the barn under a tarp.

It looks like a coat to bed. Not every night. Just December through the first part of March. I had a brown quilted one I kept for it, and I would lie there in that coat beside my husband in his, the two of us like a pair of feed sacks, and tell him goodnight.

It looks like Christmas with everybody’s coat on. Trish was eighteen the first year. She opened her presents in mittens and laughed about it. She was a good sport about it for a long time. Then she had children of her own, and one year she said they would drive back to Lincoln that night instead of staying over, because of the baby’s chest. And after that they always drove back that night.

I have two grandchildren. Emma is eight and Cody is five. Neither one of them had ever slept under my roof.

You will want to know how a woman lives with a man for forty years and does not know about $212,000.

Dale kept the books. He always had. He was good at it and I was tired at night. Every March he did the taxes himself at the kitchen table, with the shoebox and a pencil, and when he was done he turned the return to the last page and put his finger where I was to sign.

I signed. For forty years I signed. The interest on that money was right there in front of me every spring, on a line of a form with my own name at the top, and I never once read it. I am not proud of that. He hid it, but I never looked.

The bank was two counties over, and the book was in his name alone, so nothing from it ever came to our mailbox with my name on it.

And he never spent a dime on himself. A man who is hiding money buys a boat. He takes trips. Dale drove a 1997 Ford pickup with two hundred and forty thousand miles on it. He had the same work boots resoled three times at the shop in Beatrice.

And every single morning of those nineteen winters, he got up at four o’clock in the dark and went out to the kitchen and built up that stove, so that when I came down at half past five the room would be fit to stand in.

I never once got up to a cold kitchen. I want that said.

A man like that does not look like he is hiding anything. He looks like he is going without. He looks like he is going without right alongside you.