The Warmest Room in My House

“Huh,” he said. “I put those on for the Lutherans, to keep the quilting ladies from running it up to eighty. Never put one on a private house.” He straightened and looked at me, and his face was careful. “Sixty-two, Lorraine? With your hands?”

“I’ve got a little heater in the sewing room, Hank. I’m warm as toast.”

He looked at me a second longer. Hank and Walt fished together for twenty-five years. He knew exactly what I was telling him, and he knew I was asking him to leave it lie.

“Well,” he said. “You call me if you want anything looked at. Anything at all.”

He touched his cap to Stacy and went out.

Nobody moved in that kitchen. The furnace kicked on in the cellar, ran its little while, and shut off again.

Keith was staring at the yellow ticket.

“Mom,” he said slowly. “You’re still paying the propane?”

“Of course I am. It’s my house.”

He turned and looked at his wife. Not angry. Just puzzled, like a man who has added a column three times and gotten three answers.

“I’m going to be late,” Stacy said, and she went out the door with her coat buttoned wrong.

That was all, that morning. Emma got on the bus. Keith went to the plant. I put the ticket in the accordion file where the propane tickets have gone since 1982, and I sat in my sewing room and hemmed a pair of dish towels, and I waited for supper.

I made a hot dish, the kind with the tater tots on top, because it was that kind of cold and because it is Keith’s favorite and has been since he was four. We sat down at six, the four of us, at the kitchen table by the north window. Stacy had her cardigan on over a turtleneck. Emma had her hood up. I had Walt’s barn coat over my shoulders, and I did not put it there to make a point. I put it there because it was fifty-eight degrees at that table.

Keith said grace. We passed the dish.

Emma did not pick up her fork.

“Can I say something?”

“Eat while it’s hot,” Stacy said.

“It’s not going to stay hot, Mom. Nothing stays hot in here. That’s what I want to say.”

“Emma,” Keith said, but there was no weight in it.

My granddaughter put both hands flat on the table. They were shaking some. She is not a girl who talks back, and I could see what it was costing her.

“Grandma pays for the heat,” she said. “I saw the ticket. It’s got her name on it. It has always had her name on it. So we are all sitting here freezing, in Grandma’s house, to save Grandma forty dollars that Grandma never asked anybody to save.”

“That’s enough,” Stacy said.

“And Grandma can’t button her shirt in the morning. Did you know that? I’ve seen her try. She can’t open a jar. She sits in the littlest room in her own house with a heater from the farm store, and she said thank you to you. She said thank you, Mom. And every night Dad and me and the dog go in there, because it’s the only warm place there is, and you sit out here by yourself in your coat. And nobody says anything. Nobody in this whole family ever says anything.”

She was crying by then, the angry kind, wiping it off with the heel of her hand.