Page 57 of Smoke and Roses

I look at the cold stove, and her breath fogging in her own kitchen, and the socks.

“Give me an hour,” I say.

“Travis, dinner’s⁠—”

“Keep it warm.”

Martin Strong answers his phone on the second ring. Twenty minutes later I’m in his barn loading my truck bed with split, seasoned pine, a full half cord, while Martin stands in the doorway with his coffee and grins at me.

“For the florist?” he says.

“Her furnace is out.”

“Mm-hm.” He sips his coffee. “Nolene’s going to be insufferable.”

“Don’t tell Nolene.”

“Son, Nolene knew before you called.”

I stack the wood on Lindsey’s back porch in the dark, neat, bark side up. I carry an armload inside and build a fire in her little iron stove and get it roaring. Then I get down on my back on her basement floor with a flashlight and look at the furnace, which has a cracked igniter and a filter that hasn’t been changed since roughly the Clinton administration. Hell.

When I come back upstairs, the house is warm, and she’s standing in front of the woodstove with her hands held out to it. She hasn’t said a word since I came in with the first armload.

“Hey.” I stop. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” She pushes up her sleeve. My sleeve. “Nobody ever does this. I take care of everybody, Travis. Every funeral, every anniversary, every sick grandma in this valley, I take care of it. Nobody ever brings me wood.”

I come and stand behind her and put my arms around her waist and hold her in front of the fire.

“Igniter’s cracked,” I say into her hair after a while. “Gary’ll have one Monday. I’ll put it in.”

She laughs. “You can fix furnaces?”

“I can fix most things.”

She turns around in my arms and looks up at me with the firelight on her face.

“Not most things,” she says. “Me.”

I don’t have an answer for that. I kiss her instead, while the chili burns on the stove the same way her eggs did that first morning.

Chapter Nineteen

“She used to sing,” Gary says. “In the back of my store, sorting screws. Little bitty thing, singing Shania Twain at the top of her lungs.”

It’s six o’clock on a Wednesday night, and my shop is full of people.

I didn’t plan it. I don’t know who started it. Betsy, probably.

All I know is that at four this afternoon Gary Morgan came in with a coffee can full of old hardware-store photos, and then Marlene came in with dessert and a story about the time Danielle and I split a family-size order of chili fries on a dare and threw up in her parking lot.

Then Heidi Stokes from the post office came in with a stack of letters Danielle had sent to Santa from Eden when she was seven. Then Lyle Sorensen’s wife, Bonnie, came in. Then Helen Smoot, who is ninety and drives an F-350, came in to tell me that Danielle once helped her pull a calf in a snowstorm.

Now it’s six, and my shop is full of folding chairs, food, and people who loved her, and I didn’t even know how many there were.

“She was a terrible driver,” Marlene says. “Remember? She backed into the diner sign twice.”

“Three times,” I say. “She paid for every one of them out of her babysitting money.” Everybody laughs and I have to dab tears off my lashes.