The Warmest Room in My House

I did not tell her so that night. I made four cups of cocoa. I set one on the end table by her elbow, and I went back to the sewing room, and I left the door standing open a few inches behind me.

She did not come. But after a while I heard the spoon clink in her cup.

It went on like that for nearly three weeks. I will tell you plainly, I do not think I was right to let it go so long, and I do not think I was wrong. Every night the three of them were supposed to be saving money in the living room. Every night two of them and a dog ended up on my rug, and one of them sat alone in her coat, being correct.

Then, on the last Tuesday in January, Hank came with the propane.

Hank has driven the delivery truck for the co-op for better than thirty years, and in the fall he cleans furnaces for half the township. He put in the very thermostat that was now sitting under a plastic box. I am on what they call the keep-full route, so he just shows up when his sheet says I am due.

It was nineteen below that morning with a wind. School had a two-hour late start, so Emma was still at the table with her cereal. Keith had come in from plowing and was thawing his hands around a coffee cup before his shift. Stacy was by the door, buttoning her coat for work.

We all heard the truck back in by the machine shed. We heard the hose reel, and the pump running for a good long while.

Then Hank’s boots on the porch, and his knock.

Stacy opened the door. Hank filled it, frost in his mustache, the yellow delivery ticket in his glove.

“Morning. Took two hundred twenty-five gallons,” he said. “She was down to thirty-five percent. You folks have been easy on it this month, I’ll say that. Usually this place drinks more in a January.”

“We’ve been watching it,” Stacy said, and she put out her hand for the ticket. “I’ll take that. I’m keeping track of the heating.”

Hank did not hand it to her.

He was not rude about it. He just looked past her shoulder, the way a man does who has been told for thirty years where a thing goes.

“This one goes to the account holder,” he said. “Lorraine, you want it on the table or in your hand?”

“On the table is fine, Hank.”

He stepped in, stamped his boots on the mat, and laid the yellow ticket down next to Emma’s cereal bowl. Two hundred twenty-five gallons at a dollar eighty-nine. Four hundred twenty-five dollars and twenty-five cents. And across the top, in the printed block where it has always been: Lorraine Becker.

Emma read it. I watched her read it.

“Account’s been in the Becker name since 1982,” Hank said to nobody in particular, pulling his glove back on. “Walt and Lorraine, and then just Lorraine. Never been late once. I tell the young drivers, if they were all like the Beckers we wouldn’t need a billing office.”

Then he noticed the hall.

He walked three steps, bent at the waist, and looked at the plastic box for a while. He tapped it with one knuckle.