The Furnace Man Came on Monday

Nineteen Christmases

It was Trish who said the rest. I had not asked her to. I had not known she was going to.

She came away from the door and pulled out the chair beside him, the one she sat in every supper of her childhood, and she sat down.

“Dad.”

He turned his head.

“I’m not mad about the money,” she said. “I want you to hear that first. But I need to tell you what it cost, because I don’t think it’s in that book.” She folded her hands on the table, the same way he does. “I was eighteen the first Christmas the furnace was out. I’m thirty-six. I have opened presents in this house with my coat on nineteen times.”

“Trish.”

“Let me finish. I quit staying over when Emma was a baby. You remember. She got that cough upstairs and I got scared, and after that we always drove back the same night. I told you it was because of Mike’s work.” She swallowed. “It wasn’t Mike’s work. It was too cold to put a baby down.”

He shut his eyes.

“Your grandchildren have never slept in this house, Dad. Not once. Not on Christmas Eve, not in the summer, because by summer it was just how we did it.”

“I know that,” he whispered.

“You don’t know this. Emma asked me at Thanksgiving why Grandpa doesn’t like company.”

His eyes came open.

“She’s eight,” Trish said. Her chin was shaking, but she kept on. “She thinks you don’t want them here. She thinks that’s why we never stay. And I didn’t tell her any different, because I didn’t know any different. I thought you and Mom were poor and proud. I didn’t know you were just scared.”

I have seen my husband bury both his parents and never make a sound. I had never in forty years seen his face come apart, and it came apart then, at his own kitchen table, with his daughter’s hand on his sleeve.

“She said that?” he asked. “Emma said that?”

“She did.”

He put his hand over his eyes and sat that way a good while. Trish did not let go of his sleeve. I got up and stood behind him and put both my hands on his shoulders, on top of the coat he had not taken off, and I could feel him shaking under it.

When he could talk, he said, “Bring them Saturday.”

“Dad, you just had your chest opened.”