The Furnace on Gil’s Sidewalk

“It’s back on her card,” he said. “All of it. Seven thousand eight hundred. It’ll show in a couple of days.”

I looked at the slip. It said refund at the top, and the amount, and the last four numbers of my mother’s store card.

“Thank you,” I said, and I meant it, because he could have made us wait.

Gil looked at the box for a second. “I’ll get it inside,” he said. Then, quieter, “Tell your mother I’m sorry. No. I’ll tell her. I’ll drive out this afternoon.”

“She’ll make you coffee,” I said. “She makes everybody coffee.”

Abner nodded to him, once, the way men in the trade nod to each other at the supply house. Then he got back in the truck. I folded up the empty straps and put the tailgate up and got in beside him, and we pulled away from the curb.

In the side mirror I could see Gil squatting down to get his arms around the box, and the man in hunting orange stepping off the sidewalk to give him a hand.

Abner did not say anything all the way out of town. When we hit the county road he reached over and turned on the radio, low, and it was the polka hour from Stevens Point, and he drummed his fingers on the wheel.

“You did good,” I said.

“It was a forty-dollar motor,” he said.

Mom was in the kitchen when we got back. The house was warm all the way through, warm enough that the windows over the sink were fogged at the corners. She had her apron off and her good sweater on.

I gave her the refund slip. She put on her reading glasses and read it twice, the way she used to read a cream check at the creamery, every line. Then she folded it in half and put it in the cookie tin on top of the refrigerator where she keeps the important papers.

“Well,” she said. “Sit down. You haven’t eaten.”

Gil came out at two o’clock that afternoon, by himself, in his van. I was still there, washing Mom’s windows on the warm side. He knocked on the front door with his hat in his hand.

I will not tell you everything he said, because it was said to my mother and not to me. But I heard him say he had been wrong to put a new furnace in without looking, and wrong to pay a man for sending him scared old women, and that he would not do it again. He said it standing up, in her front room, without making excuses.

Mom poured him coffee and gave him a piece of the coffee cake. When he left she stood in the doorway and said, “You drive careful, Gil,” the way she says it to everybody.

He told Lyle that afternoon there would be no more nine hundred dollars. Not for anybody, ever. I heard that from Etta.

Lyle did not come to Mom’s that week. He did not call.

But the thing about a town like Marshfield is that everybody’s children go to the same school, and the elementary school is two blocks past Main Street. And it was Lyle, that week, who drove the girls to school, because Etta was sleeping days.