The Saturday We Warmed Mom’s House

Mom was standing in the doorway in her flowered apron over her lavender sweater, her white hair still set from her Friday appointment, holding out a plate of sandwiches. She had been up since five.

“Ham salad,” she said. “Egg salad on the other side. It’s not lunchtime, I know that. But you all came out in the cold, and nobody works on an empty stomach in my house.”

“Mom, go inside,” I said, around the roll on my shoulder. “You’re letting the cold in.”

She looked past me at the yard full of men. “Gary,” she said, “there is nothing in this house but cold to let in.”

The men laughed at that, and every one of them took a sandwich off her plate on the way past, even the ones who had already eaten breakfast at the café. Hank took two.

Arlo gathered us in the front room before anybody touched a ladder.

He held up his right hand, the one missing the tip of a finger to a table saw in 1981, and everybody went quiet.

“Masks on, long sleeves, gloves,” he said. “Stay on the joists. You step between them, you’ll be standing in Edna’s back bedroom, and I’ll be the one explaining it to her.”

“Baffles go in first, at the eaves,” he said. “And nobody puts insulation within three inches of that chimney. That’s what the metal dam is for.”

“What happens if we do?” Pete from the elevator asked, grinning.

“Then you’re the man who burned down a widow’s house,” Arlo said, “and I’ll tell the whole class it was you, Pete.”

We worked it like a bucket line. Two men in the yard cutting open bundles. Two on the porch. One on the stairs, one at the closet ladder.

Five of us were up in the attic on our knees, with flashlights and headlamps, laying the rolls crossways over the old rock wool, one bay after another, working from the far eave back toward the hatch.

Ben and Luke went up first because they were the youngest and could still bend.

Arlo stood at the top of the ladder with his head through the hatch and called out every roll, like a man calling a square dance.

The men joked the whole time. That’s how farm men work. Nobody says anything tender out loud, but they rag on each other all day, and you can tell who loves who by who gets ragged on hardest.

“Luke’s laying that roll in there like he’s tucking in a baby,” Don hollered down the hatch. “Somebody get that boy a rocking chair.”

“Better than Hank,” Luke hollered back. “Hank’s been on the same roll for ten minutes. I think he fell asleep up here.”

“I’m praying,” Hank said from somewhere in the dark by the chimney. “Somebody in this attic ought to be.”

Downstairs, the Mueller brothers took the windows. There are twenty-two in that house, old wavy glass in wooden sashes, and they went around with the plastic film kits and Mom’s own hair dryer, sealing them one at a time.

At nine Luke came down out of the attic, pink fuzz all over his sweatshirt sleeves, and did the door sweeps himself the way he wanted to.

He lay on his belly on Mom’s kitchen floor to get the back one right.

Mom stood over him with her hands on her hips. She had her coat back on by then.

She had only slipped it off long enough to come to the front door with the sandwiches.