Chapter 6: The Boiler

The first hard cold came on a Tuesday.

I came home from the Loop with my scarf over my nose to find a text from Rafa.

It said: Boiler's lit. Come see it. Back door.

He had spent most of ten days down there with the burner, bleeding radiators for six apartments.

My door had not been knocked on since.

I hadn't minded, I told myself.

I put my laptop bag on the table and went down the back stairs in my coat.

His apartment door on the garden level was shut.

The door beside it stood open on a wide room hot enough that my glasses fogged.

"Shoes on," Rafa said from inside. "Floor's wet."

The boiler room was a low brick cellar the size of my kitchen and living room together.

A black iron boiler stood in the middle of it with a small window of orange flame.

Pipes ran across the ceiling in a dozen thicknesses, each with a little tag on a string.

Along the back wall there was a workbench, a long scarred slab of oak with a vise at one end and a pegboard of tools above it.

The room smelled of hot metal and machine oil and him.

"This is the heart of the building," he said. "Six units, one boiler. If this goes down in January, Dolores is the first to freeze."

"You talk about it like a patient."

"It's a hundred years old," he said.

"So is everything else in this building except you."

He grinned.

I looked at the room.

I had lived over this for nine months and never seen it.

He handed me a steel thermos cup of something dark and sweet, hot chocolate with cinnamon.

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