It’s Not the Thermostat

Chapter One

Eleven Nights on a Beach Towel

So the thing about the thermostat is that it was never the thermostat.

I need to say that up front, because for about five months I genuinely believed the problem was mechanical. I believed a licensed professional was going to come to my house, look at a box on my wall, and say, “Ma’am, this unit is possessed,” and then I would pay him four hundred dollars and go back to being a person who sleeps.

His name was Dale. He came on a Tuesday. He was there for twenty minutes and he did not charge me, which somehow made it worse.

“It’s reading sixty-eight,” Dale said. “It’s holding at sixty-eight.”

“It’s not sixty-eight in here.”

“It’s sixty-eight.”

“Dale.”

And he looked at me — and I want to be clear that Dale was kind, Dale did nothing wrong, Dale has a nice face — he looked at me with an expression I would come to know very well over the following year. It’s a specific look. It’s the look of a man who has correctly identified that the problem is a woman, and who would now like to be anywhere else, ideally a crawlspace.

“My wife had a thing,” Dale said.

“A thing.”

“With temperature.” He was already backing toward the door. “She’s fine now.”

She’s fine now. Like she’d had a bout of something. Like the temperature thing had run its course and she’d been discharged.

I said thank you. I let him leave. I stood in my sixty-eight-degree kitchen sweating through a T-shirt with a picture of a loon on it, and I want you to know that at no point in that exchange did the word occur to me. Not once.

That is the first few pages. The rest of the chapter is in the book.