The Furnace Man Came on Monday

“Bring them Saturday. They can be quiet. I want them to sleep upstairs.” He turned and looked up at me. “Can they? Is there heat up there?”

“There’s registers in every room,” I said. “They’ve been shut since 2007. I’ll open them tonight.”

He nodded. He wiped his face with the heel of his hand.

Then I said what I had to say, because being sorry is not the same as being finished.

“There are three things, Dale.”

“All right.”

“My name goes on that book. As soon as you can ride to Superior.”

“Yes.”

“The book lives in the kitchen drawer with the checkbook. Not on the porch. Not in a bread bag. I am going to sit down with you the first of every month and look at every line of everything we have.”

“Yes.”

“And nobody touches that thermostat but me.”

He looked over at it, there on the dining room wall, set at seventy.

“That’s fair,” he said.

“It isn’t fair,” I said. “Fair would have been 2007. This is just what is going to happen.”

He nodded and he took it, and he did not argue one word, and I loved him for that more than I can tell you.

Then my husband stood up, slowly, holding the edge of the table. He unzipped his coat. He could not get it off his shoulders by himself, on account of his chest, so Trish took one sleeve and I took the other.

He stood in his own kitchen in January in a flannel shirt.

“Well,” he said. “I’ll be.”

He walked into the dining room in his sock feet and stood on the floor register, right where I had stood, and waited. When the furnace came on, his pant legs filled with warm air and his eyes went wide like a little boy’s.

“Bon,” he said. “Come here. Come feel this.”

I went and stood on it with him. There is not really room on that register for two people. We made room.

Saturday

I opened every register upstairs that night and aired the quilts on Thursday. I took the quilt down off the stairway door and folded it and put it in the cedar chest.

Mr. Kovar and Jeff carried my dining table in from the barn on Friday, when they came to haul off the old furnace, and they carried our bed back upstairs where it belonged. He would not take anything for it.

“I owe this family a table,” he said. That was all he said.

The children came Saturday.

Dale could not sleep lying flat, because of his breastbone. So he was in the recliner in the front room with a blanket over his knees and that red pillow in his lap when Emma came in the door, and she stopped and looked at him, a little shy.

“Come here, Emmy,” he said. “I’ve got something to show you. Take your coat off first. You don’t need it.”

He walked her into the dining room, slow, and stood her on the register. When the heat came on, her skirt filled up like a parachute and she shrieked. Cody had to have a turn. My husband stood there holding the pillow to his chest because it hurt him so to laugh.

“Grandpa,” Emma said, “is it going to be warm here all the time now?”

“All the time,” he said.

“Can we come back?”

He could not answer her. He just put his hand on top of her head.

They slept upstairs that night, both of them, in their mother’s old room. I went up three times to look at them. Dale could not manage the stairs yet. So he sat in the recliner with the door open, and every time I came down he would say, “Are they warm enough?” and I would say yes, and he would say, “Go look again.”

Around midnight I lay down on the davenport beside his chair, in my cotton nightgown with one blanket. He reached his hand down in the dark and I took it.

“I forgot what your shoulder looked like in the winter,” he said.

“Hush,” I said. But I did not let go of his hand.