Bev had worked 4 West for twenty-two years and had seen everything twice. She leaned against the counter and looked at Janet over the top of her half-glasses.
"My aunt had a cat that did that," she said. "Woke her up every night for a month. Turned out she had a gas leak in the stove. Pilot light kept going out. Cat could smell it before she could."
Janet lowered her cup. "Really?"
"Swear to God. The gas man said another week, the whole house could've gone up." Bev shrugged. "Or it could be a mouse. Or he's just a jerk. Cats are jerks. But you might want to get somebody out to look at the furnace."
All that morning, as she hung IV bags and changed dressings and charted vitals in the long green binders, Janet kept thinking about it. The house was all electric except the furnace and the water heater, both of them down in the utility closet off the kitchen, both of them older than she'd like. She thought about the faint smell she'd noticed a couple of times in the hall—she hadn't even thought of it as a smell, exactly, more like a heaviness in the air, oily, like the inside of a gas station. She'd blamed it on Del's work boots. She'd blamed it on the house being closed up for winter.
She thought about how she'd been getting headaches. She'd blamed those on not sleeping.
On her lunch break she went down to the pay phone by the cafeteria, the one under the bulletin board where Kevin Doyle's face looked out from between a flyer for a Weight Watchers meeting and an index card offering a 1979 Pontiac Sunbird, runs good, $1,100 OBO. She put in a quarter and called the gas company, and after eleven minutes on hold a woman with a voice like a nail file told her they could have a serviceman out Wednesday between eight and noon.
"Wednesday," Janet said. "What if it's leaking now?"
"Do you smell gas now, ma'am?"
"I'm not home now. I'm at work."
"If you smell gas when you get home, leave the house and call us from a neighbor's," the woman said, as if reading it off a card, which she probably was. "Don't turn on any lights. Wednesday between eight and noon."
Janet hung up. Kevin Doyle looked at her from the bulletin board. The laser beams fanned out behind his head, pink and blue.
* * *
When she got home that night, she stood in the front hall with her coat still on and sniffed like a bloodhound.
Nothing. Or—maybe something. She honestly couldn't tell anymore. She went down the hall to the linen closet and opened it and put her face in among the stacked towels and the sheets and the old electric blanket with the frayed cord that Del kept meaning to throw out. Fabric softener. Mothballs. Something else, faint, under the rest.
"What are you doing?"
She jumped. Del stood at the end of the hall in his stocking feet, a can of Stroh's in one hand.