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The rest of the time he is pretty much silent.

When I moved into Kay’s basement, I thought I might get to know my father-in-law on an even deeper level. However, Edward is probably the one person in the world you could share a tiny little house with for an entire year and learn next to nothing about. He’s always out, and when he’s home he’s always asleep or singing by himself, and if I do happen to see him, it’s like it was in the store: he materializes out of nowhere right next to me, stealthy, all-knowing and intermittently social like a cat.

I have discovered one thing about Edward in the last year, though. Before we moved into Kay’s house I used to think that the job of a self-employed commercial refrigerator repairman belonged in the hierarchy of hellish occupations somewhere near coal mining, which it shares quite a few traits with, actually, starting with the fact that HVAC men spend a lot of time wedged inside dark, narrow spaces filled with hazardous gases and sharp objects. But it’s actually worse. Refrigerator repairmen are the only people in this world standing between civilization and the Dark Ages—they’re the ones keeping the food fresh. Like gods, they have the power to turn us back into cavemen eating berries and insects, and thus their work never ceases: they remain on duty so long as their clients, the shopkeepers of the world, have things like sushi and potato salad that need to be refrigerated. In Edward’s case, it’s less the sheer amount of work that makes the job brutal than the frantic telephone calls at ungodly hours from hysterical deli owners, and being the only car on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway on Christmas morning. Sometimes he doesn’t get any service calls for a few hours, but it’s never long enough that he can take a real vacation or venture far from the Tri-State Area. In fact, I’ve only seen him outside a forty-mile radius of Times Square once, and that was for our wedding in New England.

The odd thing is, I don’t think Edward minds his job. In fact, I don’t think he’d trade it for the world. Why would he? As a refrigerator repairman, you get to indulge in three of life’s greatest pleasures: driving, smoking and tooling around with machines. Add to that virtually unlimited time for listening to music while becoming familiar with every inch of New York City’s roadways, as well as membership in the great urban fleet of repairmen, town car drivers, deliverymen and tow truck drivers, and you have what for some people amounts to something very close to The Good Life.

Nevertheless, this year Edward will turn sixty, and the Paks have begun trying to coax him into a line of work with less lifting of heavy objects and less time spent around poisonous gases. Edward may be quiet, but he can also be impossibly stubborn, and like most independent operators, he’s less than the ideal judge of when to let go. (There’s also a bit of a martyr’s streak: for instance, Edward refuses to wear a gas mask when he’s around toxic fumes, out of fear that he might unnerve his clients’ customers.) Yet honestly, I don’t know what we’d do if he decided to retire right now. Kay’s household needs funds. Not only is the house itself heavily mortgaged, but inside it are four adult mouths needing sustenance—and often many more, given the steady stream of house guests. At the moment the store isn’t bringing in any money, and it won’t until we pay off our debts. Sure, I make a contribution, but my already paltry earnings are down sharply this year because there’s no time to pursue the freelance magazine work I usually supplement my meager editor’s salary with. Gab, of course, made quite decent money when she was a lawyer, most of which got eaten up by student loans we’re currently scheduled to continue paying off till the year 2037, and the rest of which we successfully garnished into the nest egg that became the store. That leaves Edward carrying most of the load. Lately he’s been seeking out additional jobs, adding to his client base and not coming home