“Maybe not.
But you’re going to be warm while I’m here.”The furnace hesitated for a few seconds, then came alive somewhere beneath the floor with a metallic rumble.
Warm air began pushing through vents that probably hadn’t felt it in weeks.
She stared at me as if I had done something reckless.
Maybe, in her world, turning a dial five or ten degrees really was reckless.
That was the part I couldn’t get out of my head.
Half an hour earlier, I had been annoyed because the delivery took me farther from the restaurant than usual.
I had driven through freezing wind toward a house with peeling siding, walked across a porch that felt soft beneath my shoes, and wondered whether whoever ordered the cheapest pizza on the menu would even tip.
Then the back door opened onto a room colder than the parking lot.She had been waiting beneath several old quilts with a plastic bag of coins beside her.
“I counted it twice,” she had told me.
