Owing Him My Heart

A NEW MONTH, a new year, a new decade. Somehow I had convinced myself that by the first Monday in January of 1970, I would feel better. Everything would be better. Instead, the first Monday had come and gone, and I still had that jangly on-edge feeling, the feeling that I was barely holding myself together, even as the world around me was falling apart. I opened the window in the living room of my small apartment, then stood back. No one saw me. I might have been the only person in the weekday-empty neighborhood. In cold like this, even the street kids went inside. The thin January sunlight barely illuminated the three broken-down cars half-buried in snow. The plows, when they bothered to show up, had gone around them. None of the sidewalks on that side of the street were shoveled either. I always felt a moment of guilt about that, resolving to get my son Jimmy and his friends to shovel the walks, and then never acting on that resolution. I wasn’t acting on it now, even though some exercise would do me good. It would be better than suffering in the middle of my excessively hot apartment. After more than a year of complaining, the landlord still hadn’t fixed the heat. The radiator pumped enough warmth for the entire floor. Since I moved to Chicago, I had learned most radiators came with a hand-turned knob that allowed a little or a lot of hot water through. This radiator didn’t have anything like that, and the landlord wouldn’t replace it. So I opened the windows whenever I was home, and I let in the cold winter breeze. This morning, as I drove the kids to school, a kindly but unfamiliar baritone on WVON, the R&B station, told me that today’s high would be five to twelve above, but given how frosty Chicago looked, and how the wind was already blowing ever so faintly, I was beginning to think twelve was a pipe dream. I had already pulled off the cable-knit sweater that Althea Grimshaw had made for me for Christmas and tossed it on the couch. I could grab it when I left again. I normally didn’t wear sweaters like that, but I liked this one, even if I only wore it on days off. Cold days off. Since this was Tuesday, it shouldn’t have been a day off. I should have been working. I had quick, good-paying cases stacked in neglected files on my desk in the third bedroom that I used as an office. I couldn’t quite bring myself to go in there.