The Saturday We Warmed Mom’s House

“Your grandpa used to lie on that same floor to fix the sink,” she told Luke, “and he always said he was only resting his eyes.”

About ten I went back up with Arlo to look at the chimney. We had a sheet-metal dam to fit around it, and he wanted it done right.

Up under the roof, with my flashlight on the old rafters, I saw my dad’s pencil.

He had written on a rafter when he reroofed the house, the summer I was nine.

Walt T., 1983, with a line drawn under it. I remembered that summer. I had handed him nails.

“Your dad was a good man,” Arlo said beside me, his own flashlight on the same mark.

“He’d be up here with us right now. He’d be telling me I was doing it wrong.”

“He would,” I said, and that was all I could get out for a minute, kneeling up there in the dust, with the boots of thirteen other men creaking on the joists all around me.

By noon the attic was done. Thirty-four rolls, every bay full, baffles in every eave, foam around the plumbing stack and the wires, the metal dam snug around the chimney.

Arlo crawled the whole attic once more on his knees, slow, checking every bay with his flashlight.

When he came down the ladder he took off his mask and said, “That’ll do, boys. That’ll do fine.”

I went to the dining room and turned the thermostat up to sixty-eight. Mom watched me from the kitchen doorway.

She opened her mouth to argue about the propane, and then she closed it again.

The furnace kicked on. We all heard it, the old whump and then the low hum, and for a second fourteen grown men stood in that house and listened to a furnace like it was a choir.

At one o’clock she fed us at the kitchen table and the dining room table both, sandwiches and a pot of chili she had started at six.

The kitchen was warming. She had her coat unbuttoned, and she was humming.

The hymn was “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” I don’t think she knew she was humming it.

Don did, and he hummed the bass line under her from the dining room, and she never once looked up.

After lunch we did the rest. Foam gaskets behind every outlet plate on the outside walls.

Caulk around the window trim. Weatherstripping on the cellar door, which needed more than weatherstripping, but that would have to wait.

“The walls are another job for another day,” Arlo told me on the porch.

“Those you blow in from outside, through holes in the siding. But you’ve stopped the worst of it, Gary. She’ll feel it tonight.”

About four o’clock, with the light going gray-blue outside the new plastic on the windows, I came in from the porch and found Mom sitting alone at her kitchen table.

The little space heater was off. She had unplugged it and wound the cord around it neatly and set it in the corner by the broom, like something she was finished with.

She was still in the navy coat. She put one hand flat on the table, the way you would feel a child’s forehead, like she was checking for something.

“It’s warm,” she said. Not to me. To the kitchen, maybe. Or to Dad.

Then she stood up and unbuttoned the coat, one button at a time.

She slipped it off her shoulders and carried it across the kitchen to the hook by the back door.