The Furnace on Gil’s Sidewalk

“You told my mother she could die in her sleep,” I said.

I did not raise my voice. I have never been a yeller. But I said it slowly so he would hear every word of it.

“She sat up all night in her coat, Lyle. With the window open. In November. She’s seventy-seven years old. She was afraid to breathe in her own house.”

He leaned the rake against the truck. He put both hands on the cold hood and leaned on them and looked down.

“I know,” he said. “I know it.”

“Then call Gil,” I said. “Tell him the old one’s fine. Tell him to come take his furnace out and put her money back on that card. You have until Friday. I’m not going to tell Etta. I’m going to let you.”

He nodded without looking up. I got in my car and went back to my route.

I have been asked if I should have gone straight to my sister that morning. Maybe. But Etta was sleeping after a twelve-hour shift, holding up a house on her own paycheck, and I wanted Lyle to have the chance to be the one who fixed it. I believed he would. I believed it all the way until Friday afternoon.

Friday came. Nobody called Mom. Nobody called me. Gil’s van did not pull into her yard. When I drove by the heating shop on my way home, the lights were on and Gil was at the counter with a customer, laughing.

At four o’clock my phone rang and it was Etta.

“Noreen,” she said. “What’s going on with Mom’s furnace?”

Lyle had not told her. Mom had, finally, on the phone that afternoon, because she thought Etta already knew and she wanted to apologize for making trouble. So my sister heard it from our mother, who was saying sorry for something that had been done to her.

I told Etta all of it. The motor, the camera, the nine hundred dollars. I was standing at my kitchen sink with the water running so I would have something to look at.

She did not say anything for a long time. Then I heard her start to cry, the quiet way she has cried since we were girls, where you mostly hear the breathing.

“I didn’t know,” she said. “Noreen, I swear to you I didn’t know about any money.”

“I know you didn’t.”

“He told me Gil was doing Mom a favor. He told me he got her the friends price.”

“I know.”

“What are you going to do?”

I looked out the window. Abner was in the garage with the door up, and I could see him at the workbench with the inducer motor from Spencer, wiping it down with a rag.

“Abner’s going to put her furnace back in tomorrow,” I said. “And then we’re going to take Gil’s back to him.”

“Back to the shop?”

“Back to the shop.”

There was a pause, and then my sister, who has never once in her life raised her voice to anybody, said, “Good.”

Abner was at Mom’s by seven Saturday morning. It was just getting light, a gray, bright, cold sky with no wind. Our neighbor Royce, who is seventy and retired from the county highway department and still the strongest man I know, came over in his own truck to help carry.