The Warmest Room in My House

“And then Keith comes home and says twenty-eight hours, and I’m right back in that bed. I look at that tank out by your shed and all I can see is it going down. So I put a lock on it. On you. In your own home.” She shook her head. “I knew it was wrong the day I did it. I knew when you thanked me. I just couldn’t make my hand turn that key.”

I got up from the table then.

I am not a hugging woman, particularly. I was raised by Germans. But I took Walt’s barn coat off my own shoulders and I put it around hers, and I held it closed at her collar a second, the way you would on a child going out to the bus.

“Sit there,” I said.

I went to the sewing room and took down the accordion file from the closet shelf. It is brown and it is fat and the elastic has been replaced twice. I carried it back and set it on the table in front of my daughter-in-law.

“You like columns,” I said. “There’s ten years of propane in there. Every ticket. The first six are in Walt’s hand and the last four are in mine. Go on and look.”

She opened it. She has an eye for figures, that girl, and I watched it move down the tickets. Three hundred dollars, four hundred, two hundred ten. A terrible winter when it went over six. Year on year on year. And on every one, in pencil in the corner, the same four letters: paid.

“Walt and I never had much,” I said. “We milked thirty cows and we drove our cars till the floors rusted out. But we decided the first winter we were married that this would be a warm house. We’d go without other things. Nobody who came through that door was going to be cold. That propane has been in my budget since before you were born, Stacy. It is not an emergency. It is not going to surprise anyone. It’s just what January costs.”

She was turning the tickets over one at a time, very gently.

“The truck comes,” I said. “It has come for forty-four years. It will come next month. You are not in that trailer, and my granddaughter is never going to count days in a cold bed. Not in this house. Do you hear me?”

She nodded. She could not talk.

Then she reached in her cardigan pocket, and she laid the little silver key on the table and slid it toward me.

I slid it back.

“I don’t want it.”

“Lorraine. Please. Take it.”

“I don’t want a key to anything in my own house,” I said. “I never have had one and I’m too old to start. If I take that, then tomorrow I’m the one with the key, and somebody else is the one without, and we are no better off. I just want my wall back the way Walt left it.”

I went to the telephone and called Hank at home.

He was there at seven the next morning, before anybody had left. He did not ask one question. He had a key on his ring that fit, because he says those boxes all take the same one, and he had the lock open and the four screws out in the time it took the coffee to perk. He filled the holes with a dab of patching compound from his truck and smoothed them with his thumb.

Stacy stood in the hall and watched the whole thing with her arms crossed tight. When the box was off, she was the one who reached up.