The Power They Cut In The Freeze

Here is what had happened, as I put it together over the next day. In December my mother mailed her electric bill, a check for $112, as she had done every month since 1971. The co-op’s office, short a clerk that month, posted her check to the wrong account. There is another Sperry on Cottonwood Road, a young man who rents the house at the end, and somebody keyed the wrong digit. His bill got paid twice. My mother’s did not get paid at all. The system added a $28 collection charge, which made $140, and in January it mailed her a final notice, and the week of the ice it printed a disconnect order.

Cindy found the mistake on Tuesday. She wrote it on a sticky note and stuck it to her monitor, meaning to walk it down the hall. It was still there Wednesday morning when the disconnect sheet printed at six and the manager signed it before the linemen went out.

“It’s all right,” my mother said. “Somebody made a mistake. People do.”

“They took your power in a hard freeze, Mom. It’s been on the news for four days.”

She did not argue. She pulled the quilt up.

I took her hands. The fingers were cold but pink. I found the thermometer in the bathroom medicine cabinet, the kind you put under the tongue, and it said ninety-seven point four. I asked her the date, and the day of the week, and who the governor was and what she thought of him. That was a relief and also a little rude.

The clinic’s nurse line was on a magnet on the refrigerator door. I called from the car so she could not hear me. The nurse told me to keep my mother above sixty-five degrees in the room she slept in, and to watch for hard shivering, slurred words, or sleepiness she could not wake out of. If I saw any of that, I was to call 911 and not drive. “And if you can get her somewhere with heat tonight, do that,” she said. “The county opened the fellowship hall at the Lutheran church this afternoon.”

I went back in and said so.

“The pipes will go,” my mother said. “I’m not leaving this house with no heat and letting the pipes burst. Your father put that copper in himself.”

“We could drain them.”

“And then what? I come home to a house with no water and a hip that can’t carry buckets? No.” She looked at me over her glasses. “I’ll go if I’m ready to go, Deborah. Not because a man in an office says so.”

The state patrol had closed two of the roads east of town. Black ice, an eighty-one-year-old, a new hip. I set a rule with myself. If the kitchen dropped below sixty, or she started to shiver hard, I would carry her to the car and she could argue with me from the passenger seat. Then I set my phone alarm for every two hours, to put the thermometer in her mouth.

We slept in the kitchen. I made her a bed of the recliner and the quilts, and I lay on the floor on a camp pad from the car with my coat on and Daddy’s barn coat over my feet. Around midnight Lonnie called from a truck stop in Wisconsin. He said, “Is she scared?”

“No,” I said. “She’s embarrassed.”

“Ah,” Lonnie said. “Well. That’s worse.”

It was worse. I understood that around two in the morning, when I woke to a small sound in the dark and found my mother sitting up in the recliner with the flashlight turned down to nothing, sitting very straight.

“Mom?”

“I’m all right. Go back to sleep.”

“What are you doing?”

She was quiet for a long minute.

“I was thinking I’m eighty-one and I can’t even keep my own lights on,” she said. “Your father would have a fit.”

“It wasn’t you.”

“It’s always you, when it’s your house.” She stopped, and started again, level. “I’m not cold, Deborah. I’ve been colder. I’m just so ashamed I don’t know where to put myself.”

I crawled over and got up on the arm of the recliner and put my arm around her. We hadn’t sat that way since I was in high school. She smelled like cold wool and lavender hand cream. She was shaking, and not from the cold.

“You have nothing to be ashamed of,” I said. “Not one thing. They owe you.”

“Hush,” she said. “It’ll sort out.”

I did not sleep after that. I watched the green light on the alarm and listened to the wick tick, and I made up my mind that it was not going to sort itself out.