"They gonna be okay?" Chuy asked.
"The husband, I think. The wife, they took her to Denver. They have a chamber up there." He looked at the backpack on the hook, and at Ingot under it, and I held my breath. But all he said was, "Gentlemen, I want everybody talking about it. Anybody comes in here, anybody you see at the Safeway, anybody's kid, you tell them. Don't heat the house with the stove." Then he picked up his pen and went back to his crossword, and I let my breath out, and I didn't think about carbon monoxide again for three days.
On Sunday night my father called from Gillette. He sounded tired, and the wind was there behind him, hissing. He said the drilling was slowing down up there too now, the price of oil was falling, and he didn't know how long Fermin's cousin's crew would keep them, but for now it was all right, for now he was working. He asked how my grandfather was. I said fine. He asked if I was helping my mother. I said yes.
"How's the red dot?" he said.
"Good," I said. "The firehouse dog keeps barking at it."
He laughed. It was the first time I'd heard him laugh since the fall, and it came down the line from Wyoming small and crackly, and I pressed the phone hard against my ear so I wouldn't miss any of it. "Well," he said, "that's a smart dog. She knows a fire engine when she sees one."
I didn't tell him why I was at the firehouse. I didn't tell him I was there when I was supposed to be home. I didn't tell him that I lay in bed every night now with my stomach hurting, telling myself I'd stop going over, and that every afternoon at four o'clock I went anyway. I think if he'd asked me straight out I would have told him everything. He didn't. He said he loved me, which he said like it was one word, and then the operator came on and said his three minutes were up and he'd have to deposit another seventy-five cents, and he said, "Okay, mijo, okay, tell your mother," and the line went dead.