The Warmest Room in My House

“Grandma,” she said after a while, very low. “Why don’t you just take it off? The box. It’s your house.”

“Because I’d rather be asked into a thing than push my way in,” I said. “Even in my own house. Your mother is trying to take care of something. I don’t know yet what it is.”

Emma thought about that.

“She’s not mean,” she said. “She just gets scared about money and then she gets like this.”

“I know she isn’t mean.”

“It’s still not right, though.”

“No,” I said. “It isn’t. Do your algebra.”

She came every evening after that. She brought her own pillow the second night. The third night I got down my button jar and showed her how to sew a button back on her winter coat with a shank, so it would not pull, and she sewed on four that did not even need it.

The Thursday after that, there was a heavier knock.

“Mom?” Keith put his head in. “You mind if I watch the game in here? The Wild are on. I can’t feel my feet out there.”

“Bring a chair.”

He brought a folding chair from the cellar and set it by the door. So then there were three of us in a room nine feet by ten: me in my chair with the quilt, Emma on the rug with her books, and my grown son on a folding chair with his elbows on his knees, watching hockey on a television the size of a bread box with the sound turned low.

Nobody said one word about why.

Around the second period there was a scratching, and a whine. Emma reached up and turned the knob, and their old beagle, Duke, walked in as though he had an appointment. He turned around twice in front of the heater and lay down with a groan.

“Well, that’s all of us,” Keith said. Then he heard what he had said, and his ears went red, and he looked hard at the hockey.

Because it was not all of us.

When I went out to the kitchen to put the kettle on, I could see into the living room. Stacy was sitting at the far end of the sofa with her winter coat on and an afghan over her legs. She had her notebook on her knee and a pencil in her mitten. The lamp was on beside her. Her breath was not quite showing, but it was near to it.

She looked very young, sitting there. She looked like a girl waiting for a bus.

“Stacy,” I said from the doorway. “There’s room. Come sit with us. I’m making cocoa.”

She did not look up from her columns.

“I’m fine, thank you. Somebody has to keep an eye on things.”

“It’s warm in there.”

“It’s warm in there because that heater is running on electricity,” she said. “That isn’t free either, Lorraine.”

She was right about that, as a matter of fact. When the bill from the electric cooperative came, it was up thirty-one dollars over the January before. I had done the arithmetic myself at the sewing table. The box on the wall was saving forty dollars in propane, and the heater on the floor was spending thirty-one of it. All that shivering, for nine dollars a month.