The Furnace on Gil’s Sidewalk

It was an invoice from the heating shop on Main Street. New high-efficiency gas furnace, installed, removal of old equipment, new venting. The total at the bottom was seven thousand eight hundred dollars, and under it in blue ink someone had written the word paid, and the last four numbers of her card.

“Mom,” I said. “When did this happen?”

“Sunday night it started making a noise,” she said. “A grinding, like something caught in it. I called Lyle because he’s close, and he came over and listened and went down the basement. When he came back up he was white. He said, Velma, you can’t sleep in this house tonight.”

“Where did you sleep?”

“In my recliner with the window open a crack,” she said. “He told me to keep the window open. I had my coat on and two afghans. Monday morning he brought his friend Gil out, and Gil’s boys had the new one in by noon.”

“Did Gil show you the crack?”

She looked at her hands. “He said it was too far inside to see without taking the whole thing apart. He said he’d seen a hundred of them. He said a furnace that age, twelve years, they all go the same way.”

I want to be fair to my mother, because people who have not been seventy-seven and alone in a farmhouse in November do not always understand. She was not foolish.

She kept the books for a creamery that ran four trucks and paid ninety farmers, and she never once lost a nickel. But a man she trusted had stood in her kitchen and told her the air she was breathing could kill her, and he had looked frightened when he said it.

“Why didn’t you call Abner?” I asked, and I tried to keep my voice soft.

“He’s run off his feet,” she said. “It’s the first cold week. You told me yourself his phone rings at five in the morning. Lyle was five minutes away, and Lyle said Gil could do it right away. I didn’t want to be a bother.”

My husband, Abner Pflug, has been a heating and cooling man for thirty years. He went through the technical college in Wausau when he was twenty-two and he has been on his back in basements across three counties ever since. If you have a furnace between Marshfield and Neillsville, there is a fair chance Abner has had his hands in it.

And my mother did not want to be a bother.

I sat there and felt something go cold in my chest. Not at her. At the whole thing. At the idea of her sitting up all night in a coat with the window cracked, afraid of her own house.

“Is it on the card?” I asked.

“It’s on the card.”

“The Visa from the bank, or the one from the farm store?”

“The store card,” she said quietly. “The bank card only goes to five thousand.”

I knew that card. It was the one that charged twenty-two percent. She had it for buying feed when Dad was alive and she had never closed it.

I finished the route because the mail has to go and people were waiting on checks and medicine. I do not remember much of the next thirty boxes. At lunch I parked in the turnaround by the township hall and called Abner.