VI
I should tell it properly, the way Peter asked. I've never told the whole thing to anybody. Gloria was there, so she didn't need telling, and Pauline was there, and Rudy. Everyone else who'd have cared is dead or moved away.
In July of 1998 there was a heat wave that sat on the city for eleven days. I was working for Lakeshore Mechanical then, on the service side, and during a heat wave in refrigeration you don't sleep. Every compressor in every grocery and bar and hospital kitchen in Cuyahoga County is running flat out, and the old ones start dying like flies in a jar. I'd been on call for five nights straight, and on the night of July eighth, at about nine-thirty, the dispatcher patched through a call from a restaurant on Fulton Road I'd never heard of, called Pauline's Counter.
It was in a little storefront between a check-cashing place and a shuttered shoe repair. Thirty seats, if you squeezed. A hand-painted sign. When I pulled up, there was a woman sitting on the curb out front with her head between her knees, and when she looked up, I could see she'd been crying, and also that she was furious, and that she was trying very hard not to let either of those things get in the way of what needed doing.
"It's making a noise," she said, before I'd even gotten out of the van, "and then it stopped making a noise, and now it's just warm. It's seventy degrees in there. There's four thousand dollars of food in there. That's everything. That's literally everything."
I went in. It was a homemade walk-in, which is to say somebody's cousin had built it in the seventies out of plywood and foam board and a condensing unit salvaged from a Sohio gas station. The compressor was an old reciprocating Copeland, and when I got the cover off and put my meter on it, I could tell right away that it was gone. Locked up. Windings burned. You could smell it, that sweet scorched electrical smell, if you knew what you were smelling for.
I came back out and told her the truth. The compressor was dead, the unit was too old to get a direct replacement from the supply house, and a new condensing unit, installed, from Lakeshore, at emergency rates, was going to run somewhere north of three thousand dollars, and the supply house wouldn't have one until Monday anyway.
She listened to all of it without saying anything. Then she said, "There's a man from the Plain Dealer coming in on Friday. Friday night. A friend of a friend tipped me. He's going to review me." She laughed, a horrible little laugh. "I have twelve hundred dollars in the bank. I opened eight months ago. If he comes in and I'm closed, or I'm serving him something out of a cooler full of ice from the gas station, I'm done. I'm not being dramatic. I'm just done."
I stood there on Fulton Road in the heat with my clipboard. I had a wife at home and a baby who was teething. I had a mortgage on a bungalow I'd bought two years earlier, and a boss who'd told me, more than once, that I spent too long on calls and was too soft with the customers.
What I did next, I'm not exactly proud of. It was, strictly speaking, a firing offense. I wrote on the service ticket, Unit beyond repair, customer advised to replace, and I had her sign it, and I charged her the minimum call-out fee, and I drove the van back to the shop. Then I got in my own car and drove home.
Gloria was up with Margot. She was walking up and down the living room with the baby on her shoulder, both of them sweaty and miserable, the window fan doing nothing. I told her about the woman on the curb.
She listened. She was a good listener; it's why her patients loved her. When I was done, she said, "There's that old Tecumseh you pulled out of the bowling alley. In the garage."
"It's the wrong size. It's too big for that box. And it's R-22, and her system's R-12."
"Can you make it work?"
I thought about it. I said, "Maybe. It'd take all night. It'd be a mess."