The Tally on My Sister’s Refrigerator

“That’s four this week, Mom.”

My sister said it the way a bank teller reads you a balance. Pleasant. Final.

She uncapped a blue pen, leaned toward the refrigerator, and drew one short straight line on a notepad held up by a rooster magnet. Then she capped the pen, dropped it back in the junk drawer, and smiled at our mother like she had just done her a kindness.

Mom was sitting at the kitchen table with a dish towel folded in her lap. She was seventy-nine years old. She had raised the two of us in a little railroad house in Sedalia on a school cook’s pay, and now she was sitting in my sister’s kitchen with her eyes down, waiting to hear what she owed.

“Forty dollars,” Tracy said. “I’ll take it out Friday.”

I was standing in the doorway with a pharmacy sack in one hand and my car keys in the other. I had only stopped to drop off Mom’s blood pressure pills on my way home from work. I had been in that house for maybe ninety seconds.

“Take what out Friday?” I said.

Tracy turned around. She had not heard me come in, and for half a second her face did something it did not usually do. Then it smoothed right back over.

“Kim. You could knock.”

“The door was open. Take what out?”

“It’s nothing. It’s a household thing.” She wiped her hands on a towel that was already dry. “Mom and I have a system.”

I walked past her to the refrigerator.

It was one of those long magnetic notepads that insurance agents give away at the fair. Tracy had ruled it into columns with a straightedge. Her handwriting has always been neat. She won a penmanship ribbon in the fourth grade and has never let any of us forget it.

Across the top, in that ribbon handwriting, it said: Lights left on, $10. Thermostat touched, $5. Extra laundry load, $5. Shower over ten minutes, $5.

Under each heading there were tally marks. Little bundles of four with a slash through them, like a prisoner counting days on a wall.

The lights column was the longest.

“Tracy,” I said. “What is this?”

“I just told you. It’s a system.”

“You’re fining her.”

“I am not fining anybody. Don’t be dramatic.” She said it mildly, the way you would correct a child’s grammar. “Electricity is not free, Kim. I don’t know what you pay in town, but out here on the co-op it is not free. Mom leaves the hall light on all night. She leaves the bathroom light on. She left the lamp in her room burning from supper to breakfast on Tuesday.”

“I fell asleep reading,” Mom said quietly.

“I know you did, Mom. That’s why it’s only one mark and not two.”

I looked at my mother. She was pleating the dish towel between her fingers, over and over, the way she used to pleat the hem of her apron when Daddy was in one of his moods.

“Mom. Is she taking your money for this?”

“It’s all right, honey.”

“That is not what I asked.”

“It’s her house,” Mom said. “I forget. I’m trying to do better.”

I’m trying to do better. A woman who got up at four in the morning for thirty-one years to make cinnamon rolls for other people’s children, saying she was trying to do better about a forty-watt bulb.

Tracy folded the towel and hung it on the oven door, square.