The Warmest Room in My House

The evening of the box, he stood in the hall with his supper plate in his hand and looked at it for a long moment.

“Stacy put that on?”

“This morning.”

“You all right with it, Mom?”

Here is the place where one sentence would have ended it. I know that. People have told me since that I should have said, no, I am not, take it off my wall. It was my house. My name is on it, and Walt’s was before that, and his father’s before him. There was a screwdriver in the junk drawer ten feet away. Four screws and I would have been warm by suppertime.

But I looked at my son’s tired face, and I saw what the true answer would cost him. He would have to climb those stairs and pick. His mother or his wife, in the first month, with the boxes not even unpacked. Whichever one he picked, somebody in that house would remember it for twenty years.

And Stacy would have learned exactly one thing. She would have learned that her mother-in-law was a stubborn old woman who would not be helped.

Walt used to say you cannot tell a calf the fence is hot. You can explain it all afternoon. The calf has to put its own nose on the wire.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Eat your supper before it’s cold.”

He looked at the box once more. He knew. I want to be fair to my son: he knew it was wrong, and he was too worn down, and too ashamed of something I did not yet understand, to pick it up that night. He went and ate.

The next morning I drove into town to the farm store.

They had the space heaters stacked in the front aisle the way they do every January, next to the ice melt and the heated dog bowls. I read every box. I picked a little black one with a tip-over switch and a dial with two settings, 750 watts and 1,500, and it was twenty-nine dollars. I paid for it out of my egg money, which is what I still call the envelope in my purse, though I have not kept hens since Walt passed.

Then I went home and looked at my sewing room.

It is the smallest room in the house. It sits off the kitchen on the south side, nine feet by ten, and for the first fifty years of the house it was the hired man’s bedroom. It has one window, one door that shuts tight, and my mother’s Singer on a table under the window. The shelves are full of fabric and folded quilts. It gets what sun there is.

I plugged the heater in and shut the door and went to peel potatoes. When I came back forty minutes later, I stood in the doorway and nearly cried. It was like opening an oven.

I spent that afternoon moving.

I carried in my quilts, the wedding ring one and the two flannel ones. I carried in my lamp. I carried in the little television from my bedroom and set it on the old dresser where I keep my patterns. The only thing I could not manage alone was my chair, the upholstered one Walt bought me the Christmas after my hip surgery.

Keith came home at four and found me in the living room with the chair tipped on its side, trying to walk it across the rug.