Gloria shifted Margot to her other shoulder. "Then I guess we'd better pack a diaper bag," she said.
VII
We got to Fulton Road at a quarter to eleven with the Tecumseh compressor wrapped in a moving blanket in the trunk of our Corolla, and my own tools, and a vacuum pump I'd bought used from a guy retiring out of the trade, and a borrowed tank of R-22, and a diaper bag, and a cooler of iced tea Gloria had made. Pauline was still sitting on the curb. She looked up at the car like she was seeing a mirage.
"I'm not here," I told her. "You understand? Lakeshore doesn't know about this. If anybody asks, your cousin fixed it."
"I don't have a cousin."
"Then get one."
We worked all night. Or I worked, and Gloria worked with me, and Pauline worked around us. I won't bore anybody with every step, though I could, because I remember every one. I recovered what was left of the old refrigerant into a tank so I wasn't venting it into the air. I cut the dead compressor out. The Tecumseh was too big for the mounting rails, so I cut new rails out of angle iron from the alley behind the check-cashing place and drilled them by hand. Because I was switching refrigerants, I had to flush the old mineral oil out of the lines, and swap the expansion valve for one I'd pulled out of the bowling alley at the same time, and re-braze every joint I touched with an oxy-acetylene torch while Gloria held the flashlight steady and kept the wet rag ready for when the solder dripped.
She held that flashlight for six hours. She never once complained. She talked the whole time, the way she did, about nothing, about her patients, about a man who'd come in that week with a pierced tongue and asked if it would affect his cleaning, about whether we should paint the bathroom yellow. Every hour or so she'd go check on Margot, asleep in her car seat in the front booth with the door propped open for the breeze, and come back and pick the flashlight up again, and say, "Still out cold. She takes after you."
Pauline, meanwhile, started cooking. I didn't understand at first. I thought she'd lost it. But what she was doing, I realized around two in the morning, was cooking everything in the walk-in that wouldn't survive. She made three hundred pierogi. She made a pot of bigos the size of a bathtub. She made pickle soup and roasted every chicken thigh she had and stewed every vegetable, and she packed it in quart containers and stacked it in the chest freezer in the back, which was too small for anything else, and when the chest freezer was full she drove the rest in her hatchback to the women's shelter on Lorain Avenue and left it on the steps with a note. And then she came back and kept cooking.
Rudy showed up at three. He was fifteen and had nowhere better to be. Pauline put him on dishes.
At about four in the morning I pulled the vacuum on the system and watched the needle on my gauge settle and hold, which is the moment in my trade that comes closest to prayer. You're asking: is it tight? Did I do it right? Is there a leak I missed? You sit and watch a needle and you don't breathe. It held. I charged it. I hit the switch.
The Tecumseh came on with a sound like a big animal clearing its throat. Then it settled into a hum.
We all went into that walk-in and stood there in the dark, sweating, the four of us, Gloria and Pauline and Rudy and me, and watched the dial thermometer on the wall. Sixty-eight. Sixty-four. Fifty-nine. It took a little over an hour. When it passed forty, Pauline sat down on an upturned bucket and put her face in her apron and sobbed, and Gloria knelt beside her and held her. Rudy went and got his disposable camera out of his backpack.
The man from the Plain Dealer came in that Friday. He ordered the pierogi and the pickle soup and the roast duck. His review ran three weeks later, and the headline was "Fulton Road's Small Miracle," and he gave Pauline's Counter three and a half stars out of four, and he wrote that the food tasted "like the grandmother you wish you'd had." He didn't know the half of it.
She tried to pay me. Of course she did. She showed up at our house that Sunday with an envelope with eight hundred dollars in it, and I wouldn't take it, and she left it in our mailbox, and I drove it back to her and left it in her register. We did that four times before Gloria told her, "Pauline, he's never going to take it. Feed us instead."