PART 2 — THE ALARM
Lisa pulled her youngest a little closer and unfolded a fire department report with trembling hands.
Two Februarys ago, she said to her brother Bradford, you remember I was having the carpets done at the little house on the east side. What I never told the family was what happened that day.
The man cleaning my carpets stopped in the middle of the job and said he smelled something wrong. I could not smell a thing. He got me and all three of my babies out onto the lawn, and then he called it in. It was carbon monoxide. The report says a cracked furnace. A few more hours, the fireman told me, and none of us would have woken up.
The man Bradford mocked for scrubbing stains out of rugs had smelled a poison none of us could, and carried his own brother-in-laws sister and her three children out of a house that was quietly killing them.
I kept this report, Lisa said, because I wanted the family to know someday. Then she looked at Gary. Brad, your wifes brother, the carpet man. He is the reason your niece and nephews are alive.
The table went silent. Bradford, who billed seven hundred dollars an hour and liked to say so, could not speak.
Gary just passed the mashed potatoes and said he only trusted his nose, that anybody would have done the same. But Lisa wrapped her arms around her children and said no. Not anybody. Him.
My son sucks up stains for a living, the attorney had joked. One February he smelled a poison in the air and carried four people out to the grass. That is the man with the steam machine.