The Power They Cut In The Freeze
Wednesday evening
My mother does not call me. That is the first thing to know about her.
Rosemary Sperry has lived in the same four-room frame house on the edge of Brinley, Minnesota, for fifty-eight years. She raised three of us there. She buried my father out of Our Savior’s Lutheran two blocks away, and she has kept his barn coat on the hook by the back door ever since, and when the furnace quits or the gutters sag she says, “I’ll manage,” in a voice that closes the subject. We have the same pale eyes and the same long upper lip, and I have been told my whole life that I also have her way of closing a subject.
So when my cell phone rang Wednesday at twelve past six, while I was standing at my own stove stirring noodles, and the screen said MOM, I knew before I answered.
“Don’t fuss,” she said.
“What happened?”
“Nothing, I’m not hurt. It’s just my lights are off. The man came and took the meter this afternoon. Something about a bill.” She stopped to catch her breath, or to decide how much to say. “My phone’s at twelve percent. I just thought you ought to know, in case you call tomorrow and I don’t pick up.”
“Mom. What’s the temperature in there?”
“Fifty-one. It was warmer. I’m fine, Deborah.”
I turned off the burner.
My husband Lonnie was in Eau Claire that night with a load of soybean meal that had to be at the mill dock at six in the morning. He hauls for a feed outfit out of Willmar, and he had been gone since Monday. I called him from the car, and I told him in about thirty seconds.
“Go,” he said. “Don’t wait on me, I can’t be there before Friday. Take the heater out of our shed, the kerosene one. Wick’s new. And Debbie, take something that reads carbon monoxide.”
“I’ll stop at the truck stop.”
There was a glaze on the highway. Forty miles took me an hour and ten, and for most of it I kept a truck’s tail lights in front of me and my hands at ten and two.
I bought a battery carbon monoxide alarm for $24 at the truck stop, along with a bag of ice melt, two thermoses of soup and a package of chemical hand warmers. The girl at the register told me the co-op had been out in her neighborhood that same afternoon.
The house was dark when I pulled in. The porch light was off. I had never seen my mother’s porch light off.
She opened the door with a flashlight in her hand and a quilt over her shoulders like a shawl. She had on her good wool slacks and her church coat, buttoned all the way, and her stocking cap, and she looked small in the beam, smaller than she was at Easter.
“I told you not to fuss.”
“I’m not fussing,” I said. “I’m cold.”
She laughed once, a short surprised laugh.
It was 47 inside. I got the kerosene heater lit in the kitchen, which is the smallest room that holds still air, and I cracked the window over the sink an inch and put the alarm on the counter where the little green light blinked at us. I dragged the recliner in from the front room so she could sit with her feet near the heater. We ate soup out of the thermos lids. My mother ate hers with her stocking cap still on and her chin tucked into her collar.
“Why on earth didn’t you call me this afternoon?” I said.
“I thought it would sort itself out. I called Tuesday and the girl said it was their mistake. Cindy, the one with the glasses. She said she saw where my check went. She said, ‘Don’t you worry, Mrs. Sperry, I’ll fix it.'” My mother turned the thermos lid in her hands. “So I didn’t worry. Then the man came to the door at two o’clock and said he had an order.”
“He was real nice about it. He said it was printed on the sheet.” She looked at the heater. “He wouldn’t look at me. He kept looking at his boots.”