Dusty Lisle had the generator halfway up his loading ramp before I got my boots on. I heard the engine quit, then the wheels rattling over the frozen gravel, and I knew that sound.
It was a Wednesday morning, four days after the October blizzard, and the sun on the snow was so bright it hurt.
Our furnace blower stopped the second he pulled the cord out of it.
I came out on the porch in my socks and boots, coat open, still holding the dish towel. Dusty did not look up.
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He was strapping the yellow frame down with a ratchet strap, cranking it tight, the way he did everything he did not want to talk about.
“Dusty,” I said. “That’s running the furnace. That’s running Maisie’s machine.”
He gave the strap one more pull and checked it with his thumb. “It’s mine till it’s paid off, Kendra. Seven hundred back out of twelve. That leaves five hundred, and my house has been dark since Saturday same as yours.”
Behind me, through the storm door, I could hear my daughter coughing. Maisie was seven, and when her asthma got going it sounded like something tearing in a wet paper sack. She had been coughing since five that morning.
“She needs a treatment every four hours,” I said. “The nebulizer plugs into the wall. The wall needs that generator. You know that. You’ve watched me do it at your mother’s table.”
He closed his tailgate and wiped his hands down his jeans. “Run it off the car,” he said. “You’re a lineman’s wife. You’ll figure it out.”
Then he got in and backed out past my mailbox, and his tires threw snow on my porch steps.
I stood there until the sound of his truck was gone. Then I went inside, because there was nothing on that porch that was going to help my girl.
The House Getting Cold
I should tell you about the generator, because Dusty had a way of telling it that left most of the facts out.
It was a ninety-five hundred watt portable, the kind with an electric start and a fuel gauge on the tank, and with the transfer switch and the wall inlet Garrett put in beside it, the whole setup came to twenty-nine hundred dollars last January.
Garrett had wanted one ever since Maisie was diagnosed at three. He is a lineman for the rural electric co-op out of our county, and he knows better than anybody that when the lines come down out here, they can stay down a long time.
We had seventeen hundred saved. Dusty had just had a good month at the used truck lot, and he offered the other twelve hundred at Sunday dinner.
Garrett’s mother cried a little when he said it. She had married Dusty’s dad when the boys were twelve and fourteen, and she had prayed for them to be brothers for twenty-seven years.
We paid him back three hundred and fifty dollars in March and three hundred and fifty in June. Then the truck lot cut him loose in August when sales went flat, and the second Garrett offered him the third payment early, Dusty waved it off. Keep it, he said. I’m fine.
He was not fine, as it turned out. But a man who is out of work and too proud to say it does not get to load up a child’s breathing machine and call it settled.