Act of Love
Mel Garber remembers the phone call clearly. “How do we turn off the fireplace again?” His wife, Barbara Bankston, was on the other end of the line. She’d turned that fireplace on and off a thousand times. It’s a gas fireplace, so all you have to do is turn the knob, Mel told her. Maybe it was a one-time slip of the mind, he thought. They were getting older.