27. Allison
ALLISON
Imeant it.
That’s the part that keeps me up. I told my husband to go to London, and I meant it all the way down, and the next morning I walk into the glass office and write G home on the wall calendar for Sunday.
I write it in pencil. Then I erase it and write it again in pen, because pencil felt like I didn’t believe him, and I stand back and look at it with my coffee going cold in my hand.
It’s two words on a calendar. My heart’s pounding anyway.
Luis comes in for the delivery schedule and sees me staring at the wall. He looks at the calendar, then at me, then back at the calendar.
“You okay, boss?”
“I’m great.”
“You’re holding your coffee like it owes you money.” He sets his phone on my desk with the weather up. “And you’re going to be less great. Look at Thursday night.”
I look. We’ve had two weeks of mud and sun, warm enough that the forsythia along the road has started to bud. Thursday night the little number drops off a cliff. The forecast says the teens by morning, with wind.
“That’s a real freeze,” I say.
“That’s a real freeze,” Luis agrees. “And we’ve got two boilers that have been limping since Christmas.”
The boiler room is a concrete box under the head house, the work building that connects the greenhouses, down a set of steps my father poured himself and never made quite the same height.
It smells like oil and dust and hot metal.
The two boilers sit side by side like old men on a bench, big and green and older than I am.
My dad bought them used the year I was born, and he slept with one ear open for them for as long as he ran this place.
They heat every main growing house we have, pushing hot water through the pipes under the benches.
Luis gets down on one knee in front of the left one and opens the little door. The pilot flame is small and blue and a little shaky.
“This one keeps dropping out,” he says. “I put a new part on it in January, and it still comes and goes.” He nods at the right one, where there’s a coffee can on the floor catching a slow drip from a fitting. “That one leaks, and when it gets mad it shuts itself off.”
“I was going to replace them this summer.”
“I know.”
I had a quote for new ones last fall. Then I was having a baby by myself, and the money went to that instead. I told myself they’d make it one more winter. They almost have.
Everything we sell this spring is sitting upstairs under that glass right now.
It’s the hanging baskets for Mother’s Day and the flats of annuals for the garden centers and the town beds.
It’s the vegetable starts and the tomatoes and the basil for the restaurant in Katonah that’s bought from us since my dad ran the place.
It’s the Easter lilies that go out next week, and it’s my crew’s paychecks through the summer, and every bit of it dies at freezing.
“They’ll make it,” Luis says, closing the little door.
“Promise me.”
“I don’t make promises for boilers.” He stands up and wipes his hands on his jeans. “I’ll stay Thursday. We’ll walk the houses all night.”
“I’m staying too.”
“I figured.” He looks at me. “Send the baby to your mom’s. Either it’s a long boring night or it’s a long bad one.”
Wednesday night I take Henry to my mother’s for dinner, because I can’t stand my own kitchen.
Janet makes pot roast. She only makes it when she’s worried about somebody. She has Henry in the crook of one arm while she stirs the gravy with the other, and he’s chewing on his own fist and drooling on her sleeve, and she’s letting him.
“Sit down,” she says. “You’re hovering.”
I sit at her kitchen table, the one I did my homework at and signed my first greenhouse lease at. There’s a burn mark on the edge from the summer I tried to make candles. I put my thumb on it.
“So,” my mother says, with her back to me. “He’s going.”
“Thursday night. He’ll be back Sunday.”
“And you told him to.”
“I told him to.”
She turns the burner down and sits across from me with Henry in her lap.
“Can I ask you something, and you won’t get mad?”
“No promises.”
“Did you tell him to go so you could see if he’d come back?”
I open my mouth to say no. It doesn’t come out. I sit there with my thumb on the burn mark and my face going hot, because she’s been reading me since before I could talk.
“I don’t know,” I say finally. “I didn’t plan it.
He sat there in propagation three and asked me what I thought, and he hadn’t booked anything, Mom.
He came to me first. He’s never done that in our whole marriage.
” My eyes are stinging. “And I didn’t want to be the reason.
I didn’t want to be the thing he gave up London for, so he could look at me across the table years from now and think about it.
And now I’m sitting here waiting to see what happens, so maybe it is a test. I don’t know if I meant it as one.
” I wipe my face with the back of my hand. “Is that terrible?”
My mother thinks about it. Henry drools on her wrist.
“I think you’re allowed to want to know if he’ll come home,” she says. She hands me my son across the table. “Eat your pot roast. And bring him back tomorrow with enough milk for the night. If those boilers act up, you don’t need a baby in that apartment with no heat.”
Scott’s truck pulls into the loading yard on Thursday afternoon, and I know before it stops that he’s not here for trays. The bed is packed to the rails under a tarp, and he’s pulling his little equipment trailer with the mower and the chipper strapped down on it.
Molly’s out of the passenger side before he’s got it in park, running across the gravel with something flat held carefully in both hands. She skids to a stop in front of the stroller, where Henry’s propped up in his bear hat, very pleased with himself, and she holds it out to him.
It’s one of her leaves, the same green-potato shape she painted along the bottom of the nursery wall before he was born, painted on a square of cardboard with a loop of green yarn through a hole in the top. She’s written HENRY across the bottom in careful capitals, with the N backward.
“It’s so he doesn’t forget me,” she says. “You hang it on his crib.”
Henry grabs the yarn in one fist and immediately tries to eat it.
“He loves it,” I tell her, and my throat’s already tight. “Molly, it’s perfect.”
“The N’s wrong.”
“The N has personality.”
Scott comes over slower, with his hands in his jacket pockets.
“We’re heading up tonight,” he says. “The Dorset job came back. The guy they hired instead of me fell through, and the woman who runs the town committee called me last week. She said she heard why I walked out of that meeting in November, and she’d hire a guy like that to fix up her resort.”
“Last week?”
“Yeah.” He looks at the trailer instead of at me. “I kept meaning to come by. Molly said if we left without saying goodbye to Henry she’d never speak to me again, so.”
So he wasn’t going to stop. It stings more than I have any right to let it. I told him no in an orchard in January, and he’s been decent every single day since, and a man is allowed to leave town without dropping by the woman who turned him down.
“Scott, that’s huge,” I say, and I mean it. “It’s the biggest job you’ve ever had.”
“It pays off my dad’s equipment and keeps my guys working through next winter.” For a second he grins like himself. “Molly’s staying with my dad during the week and coming up on weekends till school lets out.”
“I’m going to see a moose,” Molly says.
“You’re not going to see a moose.”
“I’m going to see a moose, Dad.”
I hug him. It’s quick, and he hugs me back, but his arms stay loose and he lets go first. His jacket smells like sawdust and cold.
“Gavin’s flying to London tonight,” I say, because it would be worse not to. “He’ll be back Sunday.”
“Sure.” His mouth goes flat for a second before he fixes it. “Tell him good luck, I guess.”
“I’ll tell him.”
“And there’s a freeze coming tonight. You know that, right?” He finally looks straight at me, and there’s the real Scott, worried and annoyed about it. “Those boilers of yours are older than me.”
“Luis is staying. We’ll be fine.”
“Okay.” He nods. He doesn’t offer to stay, and he shouldn’t. “Call me if your crew’s short in June.”
Molly kisses Henry on the top of his bear hat and tells him to be good. Scott boosts her into the truck, and they pull out of the yard with the trailer rattling behind them, and Molly waves out the window the whole way down the road until they go around the bend. Scott doesn’t.
Henry’s still gnawing on the yarn.
I drive Henry to my mother’s before dark, with a cooler full of milk and his cardboard leaf. Janet takes him at the door and tells me to call her if I need anything, and I tell her I won’t, and we both know I’m lying.
Gavin calls while I’m walking the houses with Luis. I can hear the zipper of a suitcase behind him.
“How are things up there?”
“Cold,” I say. “It’s supposed to be the teens by morning. Luis and I are staying up to keep an eye on the boilers. Henry’s at Mom’s.”
“Do you need anything?”
“No. It’s just a long night. Go.”
“I’ll have my phone on the whole time,” he says. “On the plane, at the dinner, all of it. You call me for anything.”
“I’ll call you.”
“I’m leaving for Teterboro now.”
“Come back when you said.”
“Sunday,” he says. “In time for his bath.”
The wind picks up after dark, and the cold comes in behind it. I can feel it through the glass when I walk the houses, a hard dry cold that makes the panes tick. Every time I go back to the office, the thermometer outside the window has dropped again.
The boilers hold. Luis sits in the office with his thermos and does the crossword in pen. For a while it’s the long boring night he promised.
I’m out in house two with my flashlight, checking the thermometer by the tomatoes, when the pipes under the bench start to cool under my hand.
Then the alarm goes off.
It’s my father’s alarm, the one wired to a bell in the office, and I haven’t heard it ring for real in years.
I run for the head house. Luis beats me there, and by the time I hit the top of the stairs he’s at the bottom swearing in Spanish, and I can hear the thing I’ve been scared of since the forecast came up on his phone.
The burner isn’t catching, and the pumps are winding down to quiet.
“Both of them,” he yells up the stairs. “The left one dropped out, and the right one shut itself off with it. Get me the flashlight.”
I get him the flashlight. I watch him try the left one, and the pilot catches and burns and goes out. He tries it again. It goes out again. The right one won’t even click.
“I’ll keep trying,” he says, with his face in the burner door. “Call anybody who can get here. We’re going to need hands.”
I go back up to the office to get my phone.
The heat in here comes off the same boilers, and it’s already leaving.
When I breathe out, I can see it. My father’s bell is still ringing on the wall, and the glass has started to fog from the inside, and out past it every house I own is lit up gold and going cold.
I call Danny. I call Ray. I call Carla from the retail house, who lives the closest. Then I stand in the middle of my office with my breath hanging in front of my face and my phone in my hand, and I scroll down to his name.