The Furnace on Gil’s Sidewalk

Mom stood in the hall and listened to it. Then she walked into the kitchen and went over to the old register by the stove and bent down, slow, with one hand on the counter, and held her other hand out flat over the iron.

I watched the warm air move the loose hair at her temple. She stayed there a long time with her palm out, feeling it.

“It sounds like your dad humming,” she said.

I could not answer her. I went and stood beside her and put my hand on her back, and we stood there together in the warm air coming up out of that old house.

Abner came up the stairs then with his tool bag. He looked at the two of us bent over that register, and he set the bag down on the floor and said, “I need to get something out of the truck,” and went out the back door.

He was gone a few minutes. When he came back his eyes were red, and he blew his nose on a shop rag and nobody said a word about it.

Before we loaded up, he checked it all one more time. He put his carbon monoxide meter by the furnace and in every room of the house, including Mom’s bedroom, and showed her the screen each time. Zero. Zero. Zero.

“You sleep in your bed tonight, Velma,” he said. “With the window shut.”

“Yes, Abner,” she said, like a girl.

We put Gil’s furnace in the box in the front room. It slid in snug. Abner taped the flaps shut and ran two straps around it, and the two of us walked it out the front door on his hand truck and up the ramp into the bed of our white pickup.

Mom stood on the porch where her old furnace had been all week and watched us strap it in.

“Are you sure about this?” she asked me.

“I’m sure, Mom.”

“I don’t want trouble for Etta.”

“Etta said good.”

Mom thought about that for a moment, and then she nodded, once.

“Bring me back my receipt,” she said, and went inside to the warm.

We drove into town on the county road with the box riding behind the cab. It was a little after ten when we turned onto Main Street. Saturday morning. The bakery had its door propped open and people were coming out with white paper bags. The hardware store had its bins of salt and snow shovels out front.

The heating shop sits on the corner past the bank. It has a glass front door and a painted sign over the window, and a parking spot right at the curb where Gil keeps his van on weekdays. On Saturday it was open.

Abner backed the truck up to the curb, slow, until the rear tires were almost touching. The gutter was full of dry leaves from the maples along the street. The sky was gray and very bright, the kind of November light that makes everything look clean.

He got out. I got out. He did not say anything, and neither did I.

He let the tailgate down and I held it so it would not bang. He had brought one of the shipping pallets from our garage, and he slid it off the truck bed and set it on the sidewalk to the right of the glass door, square to the building, where it would not block anybody.