The Power They Cut In The Freeze
Thursday morning
The co-op’s office opens at eight. I was dialing at seven fifty-eight. I held for fifty-two minutes while my mother watched me from the recliner pretending to do the crossword.
At ten to nine I got a person.
It was Cindy, and she sounded like a woman talking from inside a closet.
“Mrs. Keefe, I found it on Tuesday. I put a note on my screen and I meant to take it to Mr. Prentice, and then the ice came. I don’t have a good reason.”
“Cindy, I’m not mad at you,” I said, and I wasn’t. “I need it turned back on.”
“I can take your payment. I can put the error credit on the account. I can’t release a reconnect. That’s Mr. Prentice.”
I paid the $140 with my card, right then, while she read the numbers back. Then I asked her to put me through to him.
“He’s in a call with the linemen. I’ll have him call you back.”
He called back at eleven. That was the call I told you about.
After I hung up I called the sheriff’s office on the non-emergency line, because I could not think of anyone else to call.
“Honey, I’m sorry,” the dispatcher said, and she was, I could hear it. “That’s a utility matter. That’s not our department. Is she in danger right now?”
“She’s cold. She’s eighty-one.”
“I can have a deputy look in on her. We’re running ice calls, so it might be a while.”
“She has me,” I said. “Thank you.”
When I put the phone down, my mother, from the recliner, said the thing I did not expect.
“Who’s on that board, anyhow?”
I turned around. She was looking at me over the top of the crossword.
“What board?”
“The co-op board. The man said he answers to the board.” She set the pencil down. “Deborah, those aren’t strangers. That’s five directors, elected by the members at the annual meeting. We put them there. I have marked a ballot at that meeting every January since 1971, and Elmer Gaines’s name has been on it more years than not.”
I had lived with that co-op my whole life. It was a bill that came in the mail on the fifth. It had not crossed my mind that the people who ran it had eaten her potato salad at my father’s funeral dinner.