What My Mother Hid in the Recipe Box
Then February came, and so did the mail.
The post office did what I asked. Everything addressed to Bernice Castle at 41 Mill Street started landing in the little brass box at the foot of my stairs. Catalogs. A late sympathy card. And the bills, one by one, the way they always had come.
I did not pay them. I stacked them on my table next to the salt shaker.
The last Saturday of the month I got out my mother’s adding machine, the one with the paper tape that she kept the church circle’s books on for thirty years. I had taken it without asking anybody. It was not a furnishing, I decided. I sat at my table in my cardigan with the afternoon sun coming in low over the roof of the hardware store, and I ran February.
Hadley Fuel, 150 gallons of number two heating oil delivered January 29, at $3.99: $598.50. I had ordered that load myself the day before the lawyer, the way I always did, a hundred and fifty at a time, because I could never afford to fill the tanks.
Electric: $163.40.
Homeowner’s insurance, the monthly draft, which had bounced off Mother’s closed account and come back as a paper bill: $104.00.
Village water and sewer, the quarter: $118.10.
Walt, four pushes at thirty dollars. I had asked him to write it on a slip for me, and he had, in carpenter’s pencil: $120.00.
The trash hauler: $36.00.
I pulled the lever. The machine thought about it and printed the total.
$1,140.00.
For one month. For a house with nobody living in it and the thermostat turned down to fifty-five.
I sat and looked at that tape for a good while. In nine winters I had never once added it up. I had paid each bill the day it came so that I would not have to look at them together. Nobody had ever handed me a total. I had never handed myself one.
The recipe box was on the table too, by my elbow, with the lid up. I had opened it the first week. I got as far as her handwriting on the first few cards, Applesauce Cake and Aunt Dot’s Bread and Butter Pickles, and I had to stop. So it sat there open, and I worked around it.
I put the six bills in a manila envelope with the adding machine tape on top. On a sheet of pharmacy notepaper I wrote:
Michelle, this is February for the house. I have not paid these. They are due by the dates on them. Walt likes to be paid by the fifth and he takes a check. The two oil tanks are a little under a quarter between them. At fifty-five degrees that is about two weeks, less if it turns cold. Hadley Fuel will not deliver without a call from the owner. Their number is on the bill. Please call them this week. Robin.
I read it over. There was not one unkind word in it. I checked.
I sealed the envelope, and I walked it across the street to the post office before they closed at noon, and I mailed it to Scottsdale.
She called on the fourth day, a Wednesday, while I was eating soup.
“Robin, what is this?”
“That’s February,” I said.
“Eleven hundred and forty dollars?”
“Yes.”
“For an empty house? What on earth is running in there?”
“The furnace. So the pipes don’t freeze. And the lights on a timer, and the pump, and the snow keeps coming whether anybody’s home or not.”