The concrete on our front porch was so hot last July that it burned through the soles of my tennis shoes even when I just stepped out to check the mail. Inside the apartment, the thermostat read 115 degrees and the digital numbers didn’t move an inch no matter how many times I tapped the glass. Clara was six months old then, and her little face was bright red with heat rash while she lay in her crib in just a damp diaper.
I had already called the rental office three times since morning. The property manager told me straight out that maintenance was backed up across the whole complex and someone might make it out by next Tuesday. Next Tuesday felt like a lifetime away when the air coming out of our vents felt like it was blowing off an engine block.
I remember staring at the kitchen sink and watching a single drop of water hang onto the faucet spout for five minutes before it finally fell. My phone sat dead on the counter because the battery had fried from the ambient heat in the kitchen hours ago. I didn’t have anyone else to call in the city since my sister lived four hours north in Flagstaff and her car was out of commission. I wrapped Clara in a wet receiving blanket just like my mother taught me, but the fabric was dry again within ten minutes in that furnace.
I sat on the edge of the mattress and watched her little chest rise and fall too fast, her tiny mouth open as she tried to catch whatever air was moving near the floor.
That was when I grabbed her carrier and carried us both outside to the shade of the building, hoping for a breeze that never came. The air outside tasted like dust and hot asphalt, thick enough to choke on if you took too deep a breath. Across the courtyard, Mr. Davis was out by his rose bushes with a yellow plastic watering can, though the water was evaporating before it even hit the dry dirt around the roots. He had lived in unit twelve for six years, a quiet man who kept his blinds drawn and only ever nodded when I passed him by the mailboxes. He wore the same faded blue work shirt every day with the sleeves rolled up past elbows spotted with age.
When he saw me sitting on the concrete with the baby carrier, he set the watering can down very slowly and walked over across the baking gravel.
“Your AC go out?” he asked. His voice was gravelly and low, like stones shifting under a boot.
“Since nine this morning,” I told him, and my voice cracked right in the middle of the sentence because I was so tired. “Landlord says next week.”
He didn’t say anything to that for a long moment. He just looked down at Clara, who let out a thin, weak cry that sounded more like a kitten than a baby. Mr. Davis wiped his forehead with the back of a thick, calloused hand that had little pale scars across the knuckles. Without another word, he turned around and walked back toward his own front door, his boots crunching in the dry dirt. I figured he was going inside to escape the heat himself, and I didn’t blame him a bit.
Five minutes later, I heard the squeak of his garage door rolling up on its rusted tracks. He came back out wheeling a heavy, cream-colored metal box on a two-wheeled dolly. It was an old window unit, the kind with heavy brass knobs and a front grill painted the color of almond milk. The casing was scratched up and one of the side accordion panels was taped together with yellowed masking tape, but the power cord was thick and black. He rolled it right up to our front step and locked the dolly wheels with his boot.
“This thing’s heavy,” he said, breathing a little harder than he should have been. “Help me get it inside.”
I didn’t ask questions because my brain wasn’t working well enough to form them. I handed Clara to Mrs. Gable two doors down who had finally opened her door to see what the noise was, and then I helped Mr. Davis lift the cooling unit over the threshold. It smelled like old dust and motor oil as we set it down on the linoleum in the living room. He got down on his knees by the front window, and that was when I saw how much his hands were shaking. He had to steady his right wrist with his left hand just to loosen the thumb screws on the sliding aluminum frame.
“Mr. Davis, you don’t have to do this,” I said, putting my hand on his shoulder. “Let me call someone.”
“There ain’t no one coming,” he muttered, not looking up from the track. “I was in the army. I had a daughter once. She died when she was two. I would have done anything to keep her cool. Take the unit. It’s yours.”
The words hit the small room with a strange kind of finality, and he didn’t explain any further than that. He jammed the unit into the open window space, pulled the wooden blocks into place, and plugged the heavy three-prong cord into the outlet beneath the sill. When he flipped the toggle switch to high, the compressor gave a loud, metallic clunk that made the whole wall shudder. For two seconds nothing happened except the rattle of the fan blades, and then a great wave of white, freezing air spilled out across the floorboards. Clara stopped crying the second that cold draft hit her blankets over at Mrs. Gable’s place.
Mr. Davis stood up slowly, using his palms to push off his knees, and wiped his face with a handkerchief he pulled from his back pocket. He looked smaller standing there in our messy living room than he did out in the yard, his shoulders rounded under the thin cotton of his shirt. I reached into my purse on the kitchen table and pulled out the eighty dollars I had left from my grocery envelope for the week, holding it out toward him across the small table. He just looked at the bills and shook his head once, very slowly, his mouth set in a straight, hard line.
“Put that away,” he said, and his voice didn’t leave any room for arguing. “I don’t need your money.”
He walked back out the front door without letting me say thank you properly, leaving the screen door swinging shut behind him on its bent spring. I watched him through the glass as he walked back to unit twelve, his head down against the glare of the noon sun hitting the white gravel. That old window unit stayed in our living room window for the rest of that July and all through August until the landlord finally replaced the central system. It rattled every time the compressor kicked on at night, a loud, steady hum that vibrated right through the drywall, but it kept the apartment at seventy-two degrees.
As the months went on, life settled back into its normal rhythm around the complex, but things weren’t quite the same between us and the old man next door. I started leaving a loaf of fresh sourdough bread on his porch every Sunday morning, and sometimes I would see him through his screen door picking it up before the sun came up over the parking lot. He never knocked on my door to say thank you for the bread, but the loaf was always gone by noon when I checked back. Clara grew out of her pink onesies and started crawling across the carpet, and whenever Mr. Davis was out watering his dead rose bushes, he would wave to her through the glass without coming over.
By the time the next summer rolled around, our central air was working fine and the old window unit was no longer needed in the front room. My husband wanted to put it out by the green recycling bins near the dumpster with the rest of the metal scrap, but I wouldn’t let him touch it. We carried it out to the garage together and set it down on the wooden workbench next to the old lawnmower and the cans of beige wall paint. It sat there gathering dust through the autumn winds and the mild winter months, a heavy, silent anchor in the corner of the room.
Last week, when I went out to look for the extra garden hose behind the shelving unit, I noticed the power cord had split where it met the rubber housing at the back. I tried plugging it into the outlet just to see if it still had any life left in it, but nothing happened when I flipped the old metal toggle. The motor was completely dead, seized up by years of desert dust and sitting in the heat of a tin-roofed garage. It will never blow cold air again, and there is no mechanic in the city who would take the time to fix something so old and rusted.
It still sits there on the bottom shelf of the workbench, wedged between a box of old Christmas ornaments and a bucket of galvanized nails. Every time I go out to grab the recycling or check the oil in the lawnmower, my eyes go right to those scratched almond-colored knobs and the yellowed masking tape on the side. I think about a man who lived alone behind closed blinds because of a grief that must have weighed ten tons, and how he saw a stranger’s baby burning up in the heat and didn’t hesitate for a single second. Arthur isn’t out by his rose bushes anymore, and the new people in unit twelve keep their blinds shut tight all day long. But I leave the broken unit right where he left it, a heavy, useless piece of metal that reminds me of what a neighbor is supposed to be when the world gets too hot to bear.
