What My Mother Hid in the Recipe Box
There was a silence. I could hear a television on her end, and something that might have been a fountain.
“I just thought,” she said. “I don’t know what I thought. I guess I thought Mom’s money paid for all this.”
“Mom’s money paid for Mom.”
“Then who paid for the house?”
I let that one sit on the line between us. She is not a stupid woman, my sister. I heard her get there.
“Oh,” she said. It was very small.
“Did you call Hadley?” I said.
“I will. I’ll call them. I called yesterday and the girl said three ninety-nine a gallon and a hundred-fifty minimum, and I said I’d call back. Greg’s got a conference this week in San Diego and I’m going with him. I’ll do it the minute we’re home.”
“Michelle. Do it from San Diego.”
“I will. I said I will. You could have just paid these, you know, and told me. I’d have paid you back.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I have rent now.”
That was the first time in my life I had ever told my sister no. It did not feel the way I had always imagined it would. It felt like setting down a bag of groceries I had been carrying so long that my arm did not know how to hang straight.
I had written two weeks. It was fifteen days.
The phone rang at ten minutes to six on a Sunday morning in the middle of March. It was Walt.
“Robin, I’m sorry to wake you. There’s no smoke out of your mother’s chimney.”
I was already sitting up. “How long?”
“I don’t know. I looked last night about nine when I let the dog out and I thought it was thin. It’s eleven below on my porch. I’ve still got the key Bernice gave me. I didn’t like to go in without telling somebody.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes. Go in.”
I put my coat on over my nightgown and my boots on over bare feet and I drove to Mill Street with the heater blowing cold.
Walt had the back door open and a flashlight going. The kitchen was dark and it was still in a way that a house with a furnace never is. My breath stood in front of me. The thermometer on the teapot clock said thirty-one degrees.
There was water on the linoleum under the sink, about a tablecloth’s worth, and it had started to skin over at the edges.
“North wall,” Walt said. “Cold feed to the sink. It’s let go inside the plaster. I’ve got the main shut off down cellar. Both tanks are bone dry, I rapped on them.”
I stood in my mother’s kitchen in my nightgown and I wanted very badly to fix it. Every part of me knew what to do. Call Hadley’s emergency line, call Jeff Purdy about the pipe, put it on my card, get the towels.
Instead I got out my phone and called Arizona, where it was not yet three in the morning.
She answered on the sixth ring. “Is somebody dead?”
“No. The house is out of oil, it’s thirty-one degrees in Mom’s kitchen, and a pipe has split in the wall. Walt’s shut the water off.”
“Oh no. Oh, Robin. Can you call somebody?”
“I can give you the numbers,” I said. “I can’t order the oil, Michelle. It isn’t my house. They’ll want a card and they’ll want the owner to say yes.”