He stood up, carefully, one hand on the warm iron of the boiler.
"You'll come at ten?" he said.
"I'll come at ten," said Lauren.
She called St. James from the pay phone at the Texaco on Montana Street with her hands shaking so hard she dropped the dime twice. The woman on the third floor said Mrs. Treloar had pneumonia in both lungs and frostbite on four fingers and was resting, and that was all she could say to somebody who wasn't family. Lauren said she was the closest thing to family Mrs. Treloar had within fifty miles, which was true, and the woman said she was sorry, hon, she really was.
At supper Gordie told her that Stu had moved the Carrigan up to tomorrow.
"Carrigan called him this afternoon. He's scared to death of this cold. Forty below tonight, they're saying. He's sure the pipes are going to go before Thursday, the coal man only does a shovel or two a day." Gordie reached for the bread. "So it's eight a.m. tomorrow. I'll be up there all day. You'll have to pick up Mandy."
Lauren put down her fork. Mandy was watching The A-Team in the front room with the sound turned up, and the furnace was running and running, and the kitchen window over the sink had grown a skin of frost an inch thick, white feathers on the glass.
She told him. All of it, from the dime to the valve. He listened without interrupting, which was one of the things she had married him for, and when she finished he sat for a long time looking at his hands on the oilcloth the way he had on the first of July.
"Laurie," he said. "That boiler's condemned."