Another pause. “Bring your own tools and check Harry’s garage. He’s got that burner control off the Delansancy job. Yeah, Christmas Eve. I know what day it is.”
He hung up and lifted his coat from the hook. “You drive?” Sal asked.
“I took the train.”
“Of course you did.”
Sal shook his head, but something at the corner of his mouth had loosened. “Come on, I’ve got the truck.”
By noon, the basement on West 143rd looked like the place Frankie must have kept in his head. Nine men stood in it, shoulder to shoulder in their work jackets. Their ages ran from 61 to 76. There were bad knees among them and one bad hip and a pair of hands that shook slightly until they picked up a wrench. They carried toolboxes older than some of the tenants. They called each other by names like Big Tony and Harry Two Fingers and Pete, and they called Miles nothing at all until one of them handed him a flashlight and said, “Hold this.”
He held it. Harry carried in a scarred burner control wrapped in an old moving blanket like a patient in a stretcher. “Off a decommissioned unit in Delansancy,” he said. “Used to be a good one. Give me 2 hours.”
“You’ll have four,” said Sal, and hung his coat on a nail.
Ida came down with a thermos of coffee and a plate of sandwiches and set them on an overturned crate. She said nothing to Sal. She simply touched his sleeve as she passed, and he nodded. And that was enough.
Upstairs, Holly stayed with Winnie and her mother, two floors above the noise, where nobody would let her within reach of a tool. Miles could imagine her at the window counting trucks.
The work went on through the afternoon. Wrenches rang. Someone told a story about Frankie and a stuck valve on a Yonkers hospital roof. Sal laughed until he coughed. Miles did not tell a story. He held the light and passed the tools and listened to men who had known his friend better than he ever had.
At 4, with the sky already going dark in the small basement window, Sal wiped his hands on a rag and looked at the boiler and at the crew and at Miles. “Light it,” he said.
Harry crouched at the valve. The men fell silent, nine of them, watching a black iron box the way people watch a newborn’s first breath. There was a click, a low wump. A blue flame caught in the chamber and flared and every face in the room lifted.
Then it sputtered. It flickered once, twice, and the flame went out. The second try failed, too. Harry sat back on his heels. Nine men stood in a silent half circle, and nobody looked at anybody. It was nearly 6:00. Through the concrete overhead, Miles could feel the cold settling in for the night.
He did not reach for his phone. He crouched beside the burner and listened. Click. Wump. A rush of flame, a beat of quiet, then the small sad sigh of it going out. The same pattern both times.
