It's a little past six and still dark outside. You're in the kitchen waiting for the coffee, and the space heater is going by the table because the room never quite catches up anymore. You can hear the furnace running behind the basement door, which you've left open since December to let some of that heat up the stairs. It's been running since you came down. Outside the window the thermometer reads somewhere in the twenties, the kind of morning Ohio gets a lot of this time of year. You nudge the space heater closer to your feet and figure the furnace will catch up once the sun's been up a while. It usually doesn't, not fully, not until the afternoon.
