The house hums a note my father never taught me

Woke before dawn and stood in the kitchen listening to the refrigerator argue with the heater, both of them wrong in different keys. There's a low B-flat somewhere under the floorboards I've started to think of as the house's confession. Funny how I grew up sorting his letters by postmark and now I sort them by smell, trying to hold onto what was never actually handed to me.