You don't ever put water in her hot. You hear me?
She did not touch the valve.
"Mossy," she said, "go up the stairs. Get up the stairs and go sit with Tomo and get every blanket on him there is, and on you, and don't come down here."
"What are you going to do?"
"What she said."
He went up the stairs backward, on his seat, one at a time. Lauren took the shovel. She had never in her life done anything with a coal fire. She opened the fire door with the poker, and the heat came out at her like a slap, and she turned her face away and began to shovel ashes out of the steel bucket onto the fire, and then, when the bucket was empty, the fine black coal dust and slack from the bottom of the coal pile, wet from the floor, shovel after shovel, onto the yellow coals, until they went red and then dark and smothered under it, and the room filled with a choking gray smoke that came out the fire door instead of going up the flue, and she was coughing and her eyes were streaming. She slammed the fire door. She found the damper on the flue pipe, a flat iron handle, and turned it shut. Then she stood back against the wall in the smoke with the shovel in both hands, the way Mossy had held it that afternoon, and watched the boiler, as if it were an animal that might jump.
It ticked. It groaned, deep inside, a long low iron complaint. The steam at the crack hissed and thinned and stopped. Nothing else happened.
She stood there for maybe a minute, though it felt longer. Then she understood that the building above her, with two old men in it at forty below, had just lost its only heat, and that a blind man was somewhere out in the ice fog, and she dropped the shovel and ran.
She found him on Granite Street. It took her twenty minutes, creeping the truck up one block and down the next, between Montana and Main, rolling down the window so she could hear, the air coming in so cold it made her teeth ache, calling his name into the white. She would not have found him at all if he hadn't been singing. She heard it at the corner of Granite and Alaska, faint and thin and high, an old man's voice in a language she didn't know, a hymn, she thought, from the shape of it. He was sitting on the steps of the Silver Bow County Courthouse, halfway up, with one hand still on the brass railing and his hat gone. There was frost in his eyebrows and his eyelashes and in the stubble on his face, so he looked carved out of salt. He had come the right way. He had only had too far to go.