The Warmest Room in My House

The sound that woke me was a drill.

It was a short, careful sound, the kind a person makes when she is trying to be quiet with a power tool, and it was coming from the hall outside the dining room. I lay there a minute under two quilts and listened to it bite into plaster my husband had patched with his own hands.

Then I put on my robe and went to see.

My daughter-in-law was standing on my kitchen step stool in her stocking feet. She had Keith’s cordless drill in one hand and a clear plastic box in the other, about the size of a loaf of bread, with a little silver lock on the front. She was fitting it over my thermostat.

“Morning, Lorraine,” Stacy said, without turning around. “Did I wake you? I’m sorry. I wanted it done before I left for work.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a thermostat guard.” She set the last screw and gave the box a tug to see that it held. “They use them in churches and rental houses. Nineteen dollars at the hardware store. It’ll pay for itself in two weeks.”

She stepped down and folded the stool. Through the plastic I could see my thermostat, the round gold one Walt put in when we got the new furnace. The little red pointer was sitting on 62.

I had kept that house at 68 for forty-four winters.

“I worked it out,” Stacy said. She had a spiral notebook open on the dining table, and she turned it so I could see the columns. “Every degree you turn it down saves about three percent. Six degrees is eighteen percent. On what a house this size burns, that comes to forty dollars a month. Forty dollars, Lorraine, for doing nothing but putting on a sweater.”

“And the lock?”

She had the grace to color a little.

“That’s so nobody bumps it. Emma is terrible about bumping it. And you know how you are, you get up in the night and nudge it and forget.” She dropped a small key into the pocket of her work slacks. “This way nobody has to think about it. It’s one less thing on your mind.”

It was the third of January. The thermometer outside the kitchen window said eleven below zero, and the wind was coming across forty acres of open field with nothing to stop it but my house.

I looked at the box. I looked at my daughter-in-law, who was thirty-nine years old and had lived under my roof for exactly twenty-six days.

“Well,” I said. “Thank you, Stacy. That was thoughtful of you, to watch the bills.”

She smiled, and I could see how relieved she was. She had braced for a fight. She patted my arm on her way to get her coat.

I stood in the hall a while after her car pulled out of the yard. Then I took Walt’s old barn coat off the peg by the back door, put it on over my robe, and made my coffee in it.

I should tell you how they came to be there.

My husband died four years ago in March, in the chair by the front window, with the seed catalog open on his knee. Keith is our only child. He is forty-three and works at the cabinet plant in town, and he has his father’s hands and his father’s way of going quiet when something is wrong. He and Stacy and their girl, Emma, had been renting a house on Fourth Street.