The Power They Cut In The Freeze

“Mrs. Keefe, I understand you’re upset, but the policy is the policy.”

Dennis Prentice said it the way a man reads from a card. I was standing in my mother’s kitchen at ten past eleven on Thursday morning with my coat buttoned to my chin and my breath showing in front of the phone. The thermometer nailed to the window frame outside read 6 degrees. The one by the refrigerator read 52, and that was with a kerosene heater going full tilt.

“I paid the $140 at ten to nine this morning,” I said. “Over the phone, with my own card. It was your clerk’s mistake in the first place. She told my mother so on Tuesday.”

“I don’t doubt that. The payment posted. That clears the balance.”

“Then turn her lights on.”

“It doesn’t work like that, ma’am. A disconnected account has to be reconnected, and a reconnect is a service order. There’s an $85 fee. And with the ice storm my linemen are on outage calls in four counties. Reconnects go in the queue, in order.”

“Where is she in the queue?”

I heard keys clicking.

“I’d say Monday. Possibly Saturday.”

My mother is eighty-one years old. She had a hip replaced in March. She was sitting twelve feet from me in my late father’s recliner under three quilts, with a stocking cap pulled down over her ears and a kerosene heater ticking at her feet, and she had been sitting there, or lying in her bed in her coat, since two o’clock the afternoon before.

“Mr. Prentice,” I said, “it is supposed to get down to twelve below tonight.”

“I’m aware of the forecast. I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”

“Inconvenience.”

“If there’s a medical necessity, there is a form. A doctor signs it. Otherwise I’d suggest she stay with family.”

He said it kindly, which was the worst part. He was not a cruel man. He was a man standing behind a wall he had built himself, and he could not see over it.

“Can I speak to someone above you?”

“I answer to the board, ma’am. They don’t take operational calls. I’ll note your concern.” And then, because he had to say something more: “I’m not the one who made the rule.”

I set the phone on the counter, very gently, the way my mother taught me to set down a plate she cared about.

“Well?” Mother said from the recliner.

“Monday,” I said. “Maybe Saturday.”

She did not say anything. She looked at the window. There was frost on the inside of the glass in feathers, the first time I had seen that in her house since I was a girl, and out past it the box elders along Cottonwood Road stood stiff and gray under a sky the color of a nickel.