Around 4:00 in the morning, she realized the heater had died. She had been standing by the thermostat, hitting it with her palm the way she had a hundred times before when it acted up, and this time it did not respond at all. No hum, no warmth, no sound except the wind outside and the breathing of forty-nine men inside. The ancient propane unit had finally given up, and the temperature inside the diner was dropping fast, and Evelyn stood there with her hand on the thermostat, feeling the cold creep back into the room she had fought all night to keep warm, and she understood, with a sinking certainty, that the night was not over yet.
The cold found Evelyn first in her feet. She had been standing behind the counter for hours, and the linoleum had stopped feeling like a floor and started feeling like a slab of ice laid flat beneath her shoes. At first she thought it was only tiredness playing tricks on her, the way exhaustion made everything sharper and duller at the same time. Then she saw her breath.
It came out of her mouth in a thin white thread and hung in the air of her own diner.
She stopped pouring coffee mid-pour. The pot trembled in her hand. Around her, the men who had been thawing for hours shifted in their sleep, pulling blankets tighter, pressing closer to one another without waking. The air that had been thick with propane heat and wet leather and the steam of a hundred cups of coffee was thinning, turning clean and cold and wrong.
Evelyn set the pot down and walked to the thermostat on the wall beside the kitchen door. She pressed her palm flat against it, as if touch could argue with machinery. The needle sat where it had always sat. The little light was dark.
She hit the thermostat with the heel of her hand. Once. Twice. Nothing changed except the ache in her wrist.
How long's it been broken?
Mason Crow was standing behind her. She had not heard him come up, which was strange, because a man his size should have made some sound, even on a floor covered with sleeping men and melted snow. But there he was, close enough that she could smell grease and cold and coffee on him, looking past her at the thermostat like it was a man who had lied to him.
Just now, Evelyn said. "It was working an hour ago. I swear it was."
Damn. He crouched down in front of the heater closet and opened the access panel with a care that surprised her. His hands were scarred and huge, but they moved gently over the rusted screws, as if he did not want to frighten the machine. "I can see where you duct taped the casing."
It held, Evelyn said, defensive before she could stop herself. "It held for three winters."
It held barely, Mason said, not unkindly. "This thing's held together with prayer and rust, Evelyn. Probably the stress of running non-stop for eight hours killed it. A heater this old isn't built to save fifty men in one night."
She stood there with her arms wrapped around herself, feeling the cold climb from her feet toward her knees.
Mason looked up at her from his crouch. "You got tools?"
Some, Evelyn said.
Get them.
She went to the back room where Henry's ancient toolbox sat on the shelf above the mop sink, exactly where it had sat for sixteen months, untouched except for the dust she had wiped off it once and then felt guilty about. The box was red once, a long time ago. Now it was the colour of dried blood and rust, its latches stiff, its handle wrapped in tape that Henry had put there in a year she could no longer remember. She carried it back through the diner with both hands, past men who were waking now, blinking at the cold, pulling on boots they had not fully taken off.
Mason took the box without a word of thanks and without a word of ceremony, the way a man takes a tool he intends to use hard. He opened it, sorted through it with his eyes first and then his fingers, and set aside three wrenches, a screwdriver with a chipped handle, and a pair of pliers whose jaws were worn smooth.
Then he lay down on his back on the diner floor and slid himself under the heater.
For the next two hours, the diner learned a new sound. It was not the wind outside, which had finally begun to tire itself out against the walls. It was metal scraping metal, and Mason Crow cursing quietly under his breath, and his voice, low and steady, saying, "Ghost, shut up and hand me the wrench," and Ghost, who had been asleep in the booth nearest the heater, waking up enough to do exactly that without complaint.
Evelyn stayed close. She could not help him fix a heater, but she stayed, handing him a rag when he asked for one and holding the flashlight steady when her hands would allow it.
The cold deepened while he worked. Men woke fully now and sat up, blankets around their shoulders, watching the man on his back under the heater the way people watch a surgeon. Nobody joked. They watched Mason work with the attention of men who knew that a broken heater in a Wyoming winter was not an inconvenience. It was a sentence.