When I last left you, I had saved my fridge but decimated the freezer. 

But I made a bet I could save that freezer. And I had come this far in my quest to avoid pronouncing the refrigerator dead. 

I wasn’t ready to quit.  

When I originally pulled the refrigerator from the wall, finding a deadfall of Cheerios and fur behind it, I noticed something. 

There was a kink in the copper pipe delivering water to the freezer’s ice maker. 

This, I felt, was a likely explanation for the refrigerator’s resistance to making ice. It wasn’t possessed or seeking vengeance or even lazy.  

It was just … kinky? 

When the freezer stopped working in the aftermath of my fixing the refrigerated section, we again pulled the refrigerator from the wall. 

That, like disposing of dead mice, is a job for my husband.  

He dutifully set about the task. 

And that was when I heard the commotion. 

My husband strode briskly past me, then again — this time with an armload of old towels. 

It seems when he moved the refrigerator — for the second time in three days — the kinked copper tubing straightened itself out. 

And broke.  

Water sprayed like we were aboard the Maid of the Mist. My husband turned off the water supply, then mopped up the burgeoning freshwater lake on the kitchen floor.  

And I went right back to thinking the refrigerator was evil. 

Once again, I unplugged her. 

Her. She was back to her. Like Christine. Her.  

Because she’s as much a possessed soul-sucking piece of machinery as that car ever was. 

I wasn’t sure how much time a freezer needs to defrost properly. Is it like a massage? An hour for a little restoration? Or does it take longer, like therapy?  

It was late morning when I unplugged the refrigerator. I figured overnight should do the trick. 

It was Memorial Day, so we left the freezer to do her thing while we went to a party. I tucked a towel beneath the open freezer door, to catch any leaking moisture. 

We had dinner with our friends, then watched as the kids played volleyball. After a bit, my daughter headed home to study for the next day’s Spanish final. 

“Hey,” she texted when she arrived. “There’s a puddle in front of the oven.” 

And now we need a little geography.  

In our galley kitchen, the refrigerator lies at one end, the oven at the other. The oven is in the wall, like it’s 1956 and I’m cooking in pearls with a layer of tulle under my skirt.   

The ceiling above the oven is actually the floor of our upstairs bathroom. The bathtub sits directly over the oven. 

Just to be clear, my house was intentionally built with a large, water-bearing object above an electrical, gas-spewing appliance.  

Even better, a second bathroom sits over our fuse box. 

Yeah.  

If a puddle lay in front of the oven, it had either spread from the defrosting freezer or trickled down from the upstairs tub. 

Holding my breath for it to be the former, I asked my daughter to check for water on the floor near the refrigerator. 

She confirmed that, yes, water was indeed leaking from the refrigerator. And that our beagle was licking it up. 

Despite having a fresh bowl of water. 

She mopped up the water with our dwindling supply of old towels then went back to studying Spanish. 

Upon returning from our party, our son crossed the kitchen for a water glass.  

And immediately went from vertical in the air to horizontal in a puddle. 

“Um, what just happened?” he asked. 

“Watching this refrigerator is like watching Dallas,” I deadpanned. “There’s always some new drama.” 

I contemplated the refrigerator. If I let it sit overnight as planned, would it continue to leak? 

“Probably,” my husband said. “It’s crooked. Look. The back is lower than the front.” 

That was just as ridiculous as Bobby Ewing showing up in the shower. So I did the same thing with that statement as I did with the whole it-was-a-dream storyline.  

I ignored it. 

I decided to believe in my refrigerator. I plugged her back in. 

I set a cup of water where the ice trays normally sit. If that water was frozen in the morning, well. It would be just like JR recovering from that gunshot wound. 

Something only somebody as boss as JR could pull off. 

Morning arrived. With it came a solid cup of ice in the freezer. The refrigerated section was a cool 39 degrees. The kitchen floor was dry. 

I rushed to the grocery store to restock the refrigerator. The refrigerator that I saved. 

Tuesday. We were all returning to work and school after the holiday weekend. My husband reached into the refrigerator for the smoothie he mixed the night before. Breakfast — on the go. 

“Um, I guess I’ll get breakfast on the road,” he said, shaking the smoothie mug. 

The mug didn’t make a sound. No liquid sloshing about. No straining spring noisily straining lumps of protein powder. 

The smoothie was frozen solid.  

The milk was chunked with lactated icebergs. My son mistook them for the curdles of sour milk and tossed the entire gallon. The spinach had frozen so solid, it was as impossible to peel off a single leaf as it is to peel a single soldier from a platoon.  

And I can’t even talk about the hard-boiled eggs. I’ve never seen eggs look like that — their shells split. Like they were grinning. Evil, toothless grins. Like Pennywise the Clown, if he never brushed his teeth. 

“I can fix this,” I said. 

“Want to bet?” my husband asked. 

Oh yes, I want to bet. 

Haven’t lost yet.