The Furnace Man Came on Monday

The Longest Night

I did not throw anything. I am not a woman who throws things. I got up, because the pipe was still frozen and nobody else was coming to thaw it.

I took the trouble light and an old bath towel and I got down under the sink. I hung the light close to the pipe the way he did, and wrapped the towel loose around it to hold the warmth in, and I opened the tap so I would know when it let go.

There was nobody to hold the towel. I held it myself.

It took forty minutes. When the water came, it came spitting and brown and then clear, and I sat back on my heels on the linoleum and cried so hard I scared the cat.

It was not about the pipe.

I built a fire. He had the kindling split and stacked in the wood box, and a rick of hedge and ash on the porch that he had cut himself in October, at sixty-four, with a heart that neither one of us knew was failing.

Then I pulled a kitchen chair up to the stove and sat there the whole night with that green book in my lap.

I went through it page by page. Every month, a deposit. Never a big one. Two hundred. A hundred and fifty. Four hundred in a good October. Once, in a bad year, eleven dollars. He had driven sixty miles to put eleven dollars in the bank.

There was not one withdrawal in the whole book. Not one.

Somewhere around three in the morning I did the arithmetic I had been avoiding. Thirty-four hundred dollars, in 2007. The account had been open twenty-one years by then. Whatever the number was that fall, he’d had the thirty-four hundred. He had sat at this table and shown me the checkbook and told me not this year, and he’d had it.

I thought about a great many things that night that I am not proud of, and I thought about them wearing a coat. I could not have touched the money anyway. My name was not on it.

Then I thought about him getting up at four.

And I thought about the sale. I was not there in 1984. I did not know Dale yet. In forty years, he had said the word “sale” to me maybe twice.

I banked the fire at five. I did not sleep. At seven I put the book in my purse and drove back to Lincoln.