He takes dessert—chocolate-coconut-cream pie, his favorite—upstairs where he can eat it while jacked into the FM.
The baby, crying, wakes him. It is very cold and still dark out. The clock says 3:50. The house is way too quiet. Shit. The furnace.
He hauls on several layers of clothes and goes downstairs. Bundled up in blankets, his stepmother is settling into her rocking chair next to the woodstove in the kitchen. Inside the turn-of-the-century firebox, the fire is roaring, stoked up by Reuben on his way to the cellar. Indy is somewhere inside Pearl’s quilts, to go by the muffled little cries escaping. Pearl shifts and suddenly Indy is making frantic snuffling noises, something she does when she knows the nipple is right there. It’s her version of scraping a spoon over the cell bars. She keeps the mess hall riot going, slobbering and snorting for a few seconds even after she finds it. Pearl winces as the baby chomps down. She smiles sleepily at Sam.
Sam shrugs on his jacket and heads for the cellar. Reuben is on his back on the dirt floor, shining a flashlight into the guts of the dead furnace.
“Know what’s wrong?” Sam asks.
“Mostly this frigging little burner was never meant to heat this whole house all the time. Joe put it in as a backup to keep his pipes from freezing when he wasn’t here to stoke the fires. Old fart never in his life heated more than the room he was squatting in.”
“I do anything?”
“Make some tea for me,” Reuben grunts. “Check the woodstove.”
Sam trudges upstairs and puts the kettle on. He adds another chunk of wood to the fire. It is putting out good warmth now. From the cellar, he hears Reuben curse. Not a good sign. His father rarely uses bad language. Sam goes back down and passes tools to Reuben until the furnace grumbles on again.
Before breakfast, Sam tries his truck and it does a fine imitation of the furnace earlier. He has forgotten to plug in the engine-block heater. He’ll have to write it down on one of his reminder lists. He jumps it from Reuben’s truck and leaves the battery charging. In the kitchen he makes himself a cup of instant cocoa.
“I want to sell a piece of the woodlot and use the money for a new furnace,” Pearl is telling Reuben.
Reuben shakes his head. He’s still wearing the jacket he put on to go down cellar to work on the furnace. Indy is sitting in his lap while he spoons applesauce into her mouth. “No. It’s yours. Indy’s. We’ve spent enough of your money. Besides, the real estate market is flat. Right now you couldn’t give away a condo at the Right Hand of God, even with free cable and a clock-radio thrown in.”
Pearl flips a pancake impatiently and slaps it with the spatch. “Sell the timber on it, then. We’ve got to have a new furnace. The baby’s going to be sick all winter if we have to live in this cold.”
“Jesus Christ,” Reuben explodes, “tell me something I don’t know.”
Startled by his raised voice, Indy starts to blubber.
“I’ll tell you something,” Pearl says. “There’s no good reason for us to get up at three-thirty in the morning because it’s too cold to sleep, except your goddamn Yankee pride.”
Reuben rocks the baby to calm her but his mouth is tight and angry. “All right. Give me a chance to ask around and find out if I can work a barter deal with someone.”
Pearl sets a plate of pancakes down hard in front of him.
“The next time I wake up to a dead furnace, I’m going out and buying one myself.”
Coming abruptly to his feet, Reuben hands her the baby. He sweeps up the plate and slings it against the wall. The baby shrieks at the explosion of the china and Pearl ducks. Grabbing his jacket, Reuben slams out the door in tight-lipped rage.
“You pigheaded asshole!” Pearl comes up onto her toes to scream after him.
Indy’s wails of terror jump another decibel and Pearl jounces her, instantly passing from shrew to earth mother. With her hand on the back of the baby’s neck, she shushes and strokes and pats until Indy hiccups and whimpers.
Wordlessly, Sam picks up the pieces of the plate and the fragments of pancake and wipes down the wall with a rag.
In the yard, Reuben stomps around for a few moments before he shuffles back into the house with downcast eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “Pigheaded asshole?”
As she wipes Indy’s nose, Pearl’s mouth quirks into a smile.
Sam conciliates. “We’re all up too early.”
The three of them look at each other and Pearl laughs.
“I guess so,” she says.
Reuben tugs her and the baby into his arms. “I’ll do something about the furnace today.”
Later, as they are all leaving the house, Reuben stops Sam on the back porch.
“Sorry about the blowup,” he says.
Sam glances back toward the kitchen, where Pearl is bundling Indy to go to work.
“Let’s take her to dinner tonight,” Sam says. “I’m up for some Chinese.”
Reuben grins. “Why not? On a day I’m blowing off the price of a new furnace, one more MasterCard charge’ll feel like a pack of gum.”
The courts outside the school are empty of everything but dead leaves and some hardly distinguishable frozen rags. Rick Woods hops and skids across the parking lot to meet Sam and they enter the school together.
Most of the girls’ team loiters expectantly in the corridor outside the gym. Poker-faced as hoods on a street corner waiting for a challenge from a rival gang, several of the guys cluster at the very doors. The Mutant poses, hip shot to one side, observing what she has wrought.
Giving all a pleasant nod, Sam unlocks the doors. They follow him
