The Furnace Man Came on Monday

What I Did Not Say

They had moved him out of intensive care into a regular room on the heart floor. He was sitting up some. He was the color of dishwater, and he had a red pillow shaped like a heart hugged up against his chest, which is what they give them to hold when they cough.

“There she is,” he said. His voice was all scratched up from the tube.

“Here I am.”

“You get the stove going?”

“I got it going.”

He studied me. He has always been able to read a sky.

“Pipe freeze?”

“Yes.”

He shut his eyes. “I’m sorry, Bon. I should have been there.”

I stood at the foot of that bed with the book in my purse, pulling on my shoulder like a brick. I had practiced the sentence for seventy miles. Dale, what is in Superior.

A nurse came in to check his lines, a young woman with a kind face, and she looked at the numbers and then at me.

“We want him nice and quiet today,” she said. “No excitement. His pressure’s been jumpy.”

So I did not say it.

People have asked me since why I didn’t just have it out with him right then. That is why. You do not ask a man that with wires in his chest. I was angrier than I had ever been in my life, and I still wanted him to come home.

Trish came at noon. She lives twenty minutes from the hospital and had been there every day. She kissed her dad on the forehead and told him he looked terrible, and he smiled for the first time since Tuesday.

I asked her to walk down to the cafeteria with me.

I waited until she had her coffee. Then I took the book out of my purse and slid it across the table to her.

She opened it. She turned to the last page. I watched my daughter’s face do what mine must have done on the back porch.

“Mom,” she said. “What is this?”

“It was in Grandpa’s tackle box.”

“Is this real? Is this Dad’s?”

“Since 1986.”

She turned the pages back and forth. She is a bookkeeper for a seed dealer, and I could see her running the columns without meaning to.

“Mom,” she said, very quietly, “the upstairs.”

“I know.”

“I had my coat on at Christmas three weeks ago. Cody had his snowsuit on in the house.” Her voice went thin. “I thought you two were barely making it.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to call Mr. Kovar.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all for now. Your father has wires in his chest.”

“And when he doesn’t?”

“Then he’s going to ask me why the house is warm,” I said, “and I’m going to let him.”

She looked at me a long moment. Then she closed the book and slid it back.

“I want to be there,” she said.

“I thought you might.”