Chapter 14 He Doesn’t Get to Come Home
Lesley
The furnace died on the coldest night of January.
It was a Tuesday, ten days before my twenty-week anatomy scan, and the temperature in Denver had dropped to eight below zero with a wind that howled down from the mountains and rattled the old warehouse windows in their frames.
I got home from work at six and knew immediately that something was wrong.
The condo was cold, far colder than the usual evening chill, the kind of cold that settled into your bones.
The thermostat read fifty-four degrees. The furnace was silent.
I did everything I knew to do. I checked the breaker panel.
I checked the filter. I found the manual in a drawer and followed the troubleshooting steps.
I reset the pilot. Nothing. I called the HOA’s emergency maintenance line and got a recorded message saying that due to high call volumes during the cold snap, technicians were being dispatched in order of priority and the current wait time was approximately forty-eight hours.
By seven thirty, the thermostat read fifty-one.
Heather and Jo were in Minneapolis visiting Jo’s parents until the weekend.
Amy had the flu. I could have called my mother, but she was four hundred miles away and would only worry.
I didn’t want to call anyone. I was a grown woman with a credit card and a working car.
I opened a hotel app on my phone and started looking at rooms downtown, and I was halfway through booking one at the Crawford when my phone rang.
It was Hank.
I almost didn’t answer. We didn’t call each other. We texted, briefly and politely, about the baby. But it was seven forty on a Tuesday night, and some part of me thought something might be wrong, so I picked up.
“Hey,” he said. “Sorry to call. Amy texted Neil that she had to cancel dinner with you tonight because she’s sick, and Neil mentioned it to me, and I checked the news and there’s a warning about furnaces failing all over the Highlands because of the cold.
” A pause. “I just wanted to make sure you’re warm. ”
I looked at the thermostat. Fifty degrees.
“My furnace just died,” I said. “I’m booking a hotel.”
He was quiet for a second. “Okay. That’s a good plan. Can I offer something? You can completely say no.”
“Go ahead.”
“Luis Ferreira runs the mechanical contractor that does all our Denver properties. He’s the best HVAC guy in the state.
I can call him right now, and he can be at your place in an hour.
I won’t come. I’ll give him your number and he’ll text you when he’s outside.
You don’t have to see me. You don’t owe me anything for it. ”
I stood in my cold kitchen with my coat still on and thought about it honestly.
The part of me that had been married to Hank for seven years wanted to say no on principle. I didn’t want to need him. I especially didn’t want to need him on a night when I’d told myself I didn’t. I’d left him so that I would stop depending on someone who didn’t show up.
But this wasn’t about that. The furnace was broken.
It was eight below outside. I was nearly twenty weeks pregnant.
The HOA couldn’t send anyone for two days, and I’d have to move to a hotel and back again with my work laptop and my prenatal vitamins and everything else.
Hank had access to a man who could fix it tonight.
Refusing because of pride wouldn’t make me stronger. It would just make me colder.
“Okay,” I said. “Thank you. Yes.”
“I’ll call him now.”
Luis Ferreira arrived fifty minutes later, a compact man in his fifties with a gray mustache and a canvas tool bag.
He texted me from the lobby, took his boots off at my door without being asked, and had the front panel of the furnace off within five minutes.
The igniter had failed, he told me, and the flame sensor was so corroded it was a wonder it had worked at all.
He had both parts in his truck. He fixed it by nine fifteen, then insisted on checking the vents and the carbon monoxide detector before he left.
“Mr. Cavanagh said to make sure,” he said, tapping the detector. “Especially the CO.”
While he packed up his tools, he told me his daughter had had her first baby the spring before, a boy, and that nobody in the family had slept properly since April.
“First year’s all about sleep, ma’am,” he said, snapping his tool bag shut.
“Get it wherever you can. And don’t let anybody tell you they’ve got a system. Nobody’s got a system.”
My throat went tight. I didn’t let it show. “What do I owe you?”
“Nothing, ma’am. Mr. Cavanagh’s taking care of it.”
“I’d like to pay for it myself.”
Luis looked uncomfortable. “Ma’am, I work for him. He said...”
“I know what he said.” I got my wallet. “I’d still like to pay. Please send me the invoice. It’s my furnace.”
He hesitated, then nodded and wrote down my email address. The invoice arrived the next morning, and I paid it before I’d had my coffee.
By ten, the condo was warm again. I sat on the sofa with a mug of tea and felt the heat seeping back into the bricks. Then I picked up my phone.
Luis fixed it. It’s warm. Thank you. I paid him, so please don’t try to cover it.
His reply came quickly.
I’m really glad you’re warm. Understood about the invoice.
That was all. He didn’t ask to come by. He didn’t mention that he’d been right to call. He didn’t ask me for anything.
I looked at the message for a while. Then I did something I hadn’t done since November.
Would you want to get coffee on Saturday? Just coffee.
There was a longer pause this time. I imagined him staring at his phone the way I sometimes stared at mine.
Yes. Anywhere you want. Any time.
We met at a coffee shop on Tennyson Street at ten on Saturday morning, a narrow place with exposed brick and too many plants. He was already there when I arrived, sitting at a table by the window with nothing in front of him. He stood up when I came in. He didn’t hug me. I didn’t expect him to.
“You look good,” he said. Then, carefully: “You look pregnant.”
“I am pregnant.”
“I noticed.” He almost smiled. “What can I get you?”
“I’ll get my own,” I said, and did. A decaf oat milk latte and a blueberry scone. He got black coffee and nothing else. We sat down across from each other, and for a few minutes neither of us seemed to know what to say.
He looked different, and it took me a while to work out how.
He’d lost weight. There were new lines around his eyes.
But it wasn’t just that. He was sitting differently.
He wasn’t turned slightly toward the door, the way he always was in restaurants, half ready to get up for a phone call.
His phone wasn’t on the table. I didn’t see it anywhere.
He was still wearing his wedding ring. I noticed it when he wrapped his hand around his cup, the plain platinum band catching the light from the window.
Mine was in the ceramic dish on my dresser in LoHi.
I’d taken it off in the middle of December, when my fingers had started to swell, and I’d told myself that was the only reason.
I looked at his ring for a moment longer than I should have and then looked out the window at the snow.
“How’s work?” I asked.
“Busy.” He turned his cup slowly. “The Summit’s being rebuilt. We’re hoping to reopen the lodge by next winter. Neil’s running the Montana deal.”
That surprised me. “Neil’s running it?”
“He’s better at it than I am. I should have let him run it a year ago.”
I studied him. He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t look at me to see if I was impressed. He just took a sip of coffee.
“How are you sleeping?” I asked.
“Not great,” he admitted. “Better than December. How about you?”
“The baby kicks at three a.m. And I had a panic attack at work when somebody burned popcorn and set off the fire alarm.”
His face changed. “Are you okay?”
“I’m seeing someone. A trauma therapist. She’s good. It’s getting better.”
“I’m glad,” he said, and I could tell he meant it. He hesitated. Then, quietly, “I’ve been seeing someone too. Dr. Morrow. Just me.”
“Since when?”
“I called her the morning after you left.”
I sat with that. It had been two months. He had never mentioned it once. Not in a text, not at the appointment, not on Christmas.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
He looked at his coffee. “Because it would have sounded like I was asking for credit. I didn’t go for you to notice. I went because I needed to figure out why I kept doing it.”
“Have you figured it out?”
“Some of it.” He met my eyes. “I’m not going to tell you all of it over a scone. It’s not your job to listen to my therapy.”
We talked for almost two hours. About the baby, mostly.
The anatomy scan the following Friday, which he’d already put in his calendar.
Whether we wanted to find out the sex. He said he’d leave it entirely up to me, and I said I thought I did want to know, and his whole face lit up in a way that made my chest hurt.
We talked about names, carefully, the way you walk on ice.
We talked about Nancy’s letter, which had arrived two weeks before, short and handwritten, apologizing for pressuring me and asking for nothing. He hadn’t known it had arrived.
At one point I laughed at something he said, a stupid joke about Luis refusing to leave until he’d personally tested the carbon monoxide detector three times, and he looked at me with such naked longing that I had to look away.
I still loved him. I’d known that all along. Sitting across from him in that coffee shop, it hit me so hard I nearly lost my breath.
He walked me to my car afterward. It was cold and bright, the snow piled high along the curbs, the mountains sharp and white against a hard blue sky.
I unlocked the car and turned around to say goodbye, and he was closer than I’d expected.
Close enough that I could smell his soap. Close enough to touch.
For a second neither of us moved.
I could have kissed him. He wanted me to; I could see it. And I wanted to, in a way that was entirely physical and entirely familiar and entirely dangerous. My body remembered him. My body didn’t care about Cheryl’s calendar or Dr. Morrow or seven years of promises. My body just wanted my husband.
I stepped back.
“I’m not asking to come home, Les,” he said quietly. “I’m not asking for anything.”
“I know you’re not,” I said. “I’m saying it anyway, because I need to hear myself say it. You fixed my furnace, and it mattered, and I’m grateful. And we had coffee, and it was good. I missed you. I miss you. But none of that means you get to come home.”
“I know.”
“I think you’re wondering where that leaves us,” I said.
“So I’ll tell you. I can’t believe yet that the man who shows up today will still be there next month.
Next year. When things get busy again.” I took a breath.
“One good night doesn’t fix that. A hundred good nights might not fix it. I don’t know yet.”
He nodded slowly. He didn’t argue. He didn’t make a speech about how much he’d changed. He didn’t list the things he’d done.
“Okay,” he said. “Then I’ll keep showing up. And you can decide what it’s worth. Whenever you’re ready. Or never. That’s yours.”
He stepped back to give me room. I got into the car.
I didn’t start it right away. I sat behind the wheel with my hands in my lap and my heart going too fast, and I let myself feel exactly how much I’d wanted to kiss him.
It wasn’t a small thing. It wasn’t a passing flicker I could wave away.
I had been married to that man for seven years, and my body knew him the way it knew the stairs in my own building in the dark, and for a few seconds on that sidewalk every sensible thing I’d built since November had gone quiet under the plain, physical fact of wanting him.
Stepping back had cost me something. I wanted to be honest with myself about that.
Boundaries that cost nothing aren’t boundaries.
They’re just preferences. This one had cost me the warmth of his hands and the smell of his soap and the easy, familiar relief of letting him hold me, and I’d paid it anyway, standing on a sidewalk on Tennyson Street with my coat unbuttoned over my stomach, because I didn’t yet know whether the man I’d have been kissing was the one who’d stay.
I started the car. When I pulled away from the curb, I looked in the rearview mirror, the way I had outside Dr. Kessler’s office in November and outside the house the night I left.
He wasn’t standing there watching me this time. He’d turned and was walking back toward the coffee shop, hands in his coat pockets, head down against the wind. He wasn’t waiting to see if I’d look back.
That was somehow worse. And somehow better. I couldn’t tell which.