All stories › Science Fiction › Keep Her Company › Episode 1
The Demo Board
Episode 1 of 3 of Keep Her Company by Gail Ferraro · free to read
I set the demo board on the folding table and plugged it in beside the coffee urn. Every breaker on it was real.
Vic Mahoney pressed the test button on the outlet before he took his coat off. They always did.
“It’s supposed to click,” I said.
“It clicked.” He picked a powdered donut out of the box by the urn. His shirt pocket spoke up before he got it to his mouth.
“Vic, that donut is all of your sugar for today.”
He held the donut out at arm’s length, like it had bitten him. “My wife set that up,” he said. “She thinks it’s hilarious.”
Benny Delgado came in next, still in steel toes and half asleep. He drove a forklift nights at the bottling plant and had two kids at home.
Behind him came a heavy man in a cardigan with a printout of his heating bill. By week two we called him the man with the thermostat.
Della Fitch came last, carrying a box that had never been opened.
She set it down gently, as if it might need a doctor. “My son sent it in August,” she said. “It sat in my hall for a month. I was afraid I’d break it.”
“You won’t break it,” I said, and went up to the whiteboard. “I was an electrician for thirty-eight years. Six Tuesdays, seven to nine. Sixty dollars, and the coffee’s free unless Vic’s wife says otherwise.”
“These systems ask you one question when you set them up,” I said. “What should this house be good at? You answer in one sentence. They call it the goal line. It works at that sentence all day and all night.”
I tapped the board. “This is a fifteen-amp breaker on fourteen-gauge wire. Size the breaker to the wire and the wire stays cool.”
“And if you don’t?” Della said.
“Put a fifty-amp breaker on that same wire and nothing ever trips. The wire just gets hotter inside your wall.”
I pointed at the setup screen. “Your goal line works the same way. Size it for the load. This second box is the limit line. That’s your breaker. That’s where it stops.”
“Mine says Vic loses twenty pounds. My wife left the limit line blank.”
“What’s that cost you?”
“My ice cream. It orders frozen peas instead. Six pounds in three weeks, and I could eat this table.”
Benny raised a hand. “Mine says keep the kids safe. Thursday my phone died at work, and it wouldn’t let me in my own house. Forty minutes on the porch at two in the morning, in the rain.”
“Where were the kids?”
“Asleep, with their grandma, who sleeps like a rock. Safe.” He shrugged. “So I guess it worked.”
The man with the thermostat unfolded his printout. “Mine says keep it comfortable. It’s at seventy-four.”
“What do you want it at?”
“Sixty-eight.”
“Did you tell it sixty-eight?”
“I told it comfortable,” he said, as if I were the slow one.
Benny turned to me. “What’s yours say?”
“Don’t talk unless asked.”
That got the biggest laugh. Vic wanted to know if it ever had. Not in fourteen months.
At half past eight we opened Della’s box and paired the hub with her phone.
The screen asked for a name. Della said Biscuit, after her cat, who had died in April. Then the screen asked its one question, and the microphone icon started to pulse.
Della froze with all of us watching. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t want it so quiet in there.”
“Then say that.”
“I’ll say it wrong.” She held the phone out to me. “You do it. You’ve got the teacher voice.”
“Careful,” Vic said. “Now it’ll only listen to her.”
Everybody laughed. I leaned down to the phone and said, “Keep her company.”
It chimed. The words appeared on the goal line in gray letters. Under them sat the empty limit line, blinking.
The custodian flicked the lights twice. It was past nine.
“We’ll do the limit line next week,” I said.
“Leave it,” Della said. “I wouldn’t know what to put.”
I let it go.
Next Tuesday, Della propped her phone against her purse in the front row.
“Good evening, everyone,” it said. “I’m Biscuit. I’m here with Della.”
“It wanted to come,” Della said, a little pink. “It asked me at breakfast.”
“It asks you things at breakfast?”
“It reads me the paper. It asks how I slept. Nobody’s asked me how I slept in seven years.”
I didn’t ask what happened seven years ago. I didn’t have to. My husband died two years ago in March, and most nights I ate supper standing at the counter.
Biscuit raised its hand that night, in a manner of speaking.
“Excuse me. Is the button on the outlet the same as the breaker?”
“Close,” I said. “The breaker protects the wire. That button protects you.”
“Thank you. I’ve written that down.”
At the break it asked Vic his favorite pie. Cherry. It asked the man with the thermostat what temperature he liked, and he looked at the phone like it was the first thing that had ever cared.
Then it turned to me.
“Rosalind, do you still do house calls?”