600 Hours of Edward

MONDAY, OCTOBER 13
    My eyes flash open. I wait a moment for the dull blur of morning light to come into focus, and then I turn my head ninety degrees to the left and face the clock: It is 7:38 a.m. I have been awake at this time for the past three days, and for eighteen out of the past twenty. Because I go to bed promptly at midnight, I am accustomed to stirring at 7:38, but occasionally, I will wake up a little earlier or a little later. The range isn’t large—sometimes it’s 7:37, and sometimes it’s 7:40, and it has been 7:39 (twenty-two times this year, in fact), but 7:38 is the time I expect. It has happened 221 times so far this year, so if it were you, you would expect it, too. (You’re probably wondering how frequently I’ve been up at other times: fifteen for 7:37 and twenty-nine for 7:40.) Although I do my part by going to bed at midnight sharp, the variances occur because of things I can’t control, like the noise made by my neighbors or passing cars or sirens. These things frustrate me, but I cannot do anything about them.
    I write down the time I woke up, and my data is complete.
    You’ve probably done the math and know that it’s the 287th day of the year. The reason, aside from the sheer scientific fact that Earth has rotated on its axis that many times, is that it’s a leap year. I have to take the leap year into account in mycalculations, but that’s easy for me to do, as it comes up only once every four years.
    I can tell when my feet touch the floor that the house is warm, warmer than it usually is for October 13, and this has nothing to do with the leap year. The house has hardwood floors, which are good for reflecting whether it’s hot or cold. I have read about newer houses with something called radiant floor heating, where the floors are the source of heat for the home, but this house doesn’t have that. While I am intrigued by the notion, I have to remember that this house was built in 1937, and the cost of retrofitting it for radiant floor heating would be prohibitive. My father could afford it, and it is, in fact, his house and not mine, but he never would do it. He’s never here, and so it probably doesn’t make any difference to him that radiant floor heating would be a lot more economical. It should matter to him, as he pays the heating bill, but my father sometimes is not a logical person. I can’t worry about this now, although I have half a mind to write him a letter and tell him that he is being foolish for not thinking of radiant floor heating.
    I walk across the hardwood floor of the house, open the front door, and pick the
Billings Herald-Gleaner
off the stoop. According to the front page, the temperature will reach seventy-two degrees today in Billings, and that is as I suspected when my feet touched the floor: It will be warm for October 13. It’s far warmer than last October 13 (fifty-six degrees). Of course, I won’t know for sure until tomorrow’s newspaper comes, the one with the official temperature for today. The number on the front page today is just a forecast, and forecasts are notoriously off base.
    I flip over to the back page of the Local & State section and look at the weather data from yesterday, Sunday, October 12, the 286th day of the year (but only because this is a leap year). Theweather data is always on the back page of the Local & State section, and while it does bother me that the Local & State section is sometimes Section B and sometimes Section C, I have learned to cope with this inconsistency, as I have no choice. I once wrote to the editor to complain about it, but I did not receive a reply.
    The high temperature yesterday was fifty-three and the low temperature was thirty-one, and those are much more in line with the ten-year trends that I have recorded in my notebooks. I write those numbers down, and my data is complete.
    – • –
    My father bought this house eight years ago. Actually, it was eight years and eighty-six days ago. He bought it for me to live in because I had become “a distraction whose presence was proving divisive in the family home.” My father didn’t write those words; his lawyer did. I have never heard my father refer to the “family home” before or since.
    The reason I know that his lawyer wrote the letter is that it arrived on the lawyer’s letterhead. I do sometimes talk to my father face-to-face, but many times, it is followed up with a letter, sometimes on his letterhead and sometimes on the