The Power They Cut In The Freeze

The reconnect

I followed Norma’s car back through Brinley. The thermometer on the bank said 9. At ten past four we came down Elm Street and I saw the co-op truck at the curb in front of a small white house with a plastic Santa still on the lawn. Jesse Kramer, the lineman with the red beard who had pulled my mother’s meter the day before, was kneeling at the side of it with his tool bag open.

A kitchen window over a sink went yellow, and then the porch light came on, all at once, and a very old woman in a cardigan came out onto the step in her slippers and stood there looking up and down the street as if somebody had called her name.

Norma slowed. Neither of them said anything. After a moment my mother put one gloved hand flat on the dashboard.

“All right,” she said.

Jesse came to my mother’s house at twenty to five. He pulled the truck into the drive, got out with a new meter in his hand and a ring tool, and went around to the socket by the side door without saying anything to me. He seated the meter with both hands and snapped the seal ring on. Inside the house, behind me, something went hhhmmm.

It was the refrigerator. After twenty-six hours of nothing it began to hum, and the baseboard heaters ticked one after another along the wall, and in the front room the green glass lamp my mother had left switched on since Wednesday lit up all at once.

Mother came to the kitchen door on her cane. She crossed the linoleum to the refrigerator, slowly, and laid her flat hand against the door, the way you rest a hand on the neck of a horse that has been running.

“Well,” she said. “There you are.”

Jesse had come up the steps behind us and stopped in the doorway with his cap in his hand. He looked right at her this time.

“Ma’am,” he said. “I’m sorry about yesterday. I should have looked at you.”

“You had an order, Jesse. Go on. You’ve got seven more.”

He went. Dennis Prentice’s pickup had been parked at the end of the drive the whole time, with its engine running, and he did not get out. When Jesse’s truck pulled away, the window came down and Dennis held out a business card with a number written on the back in ballpoint. I walked down to the truck and took it.

“If the heat isn’t up by seven, call that one, not the office,” he said. “I’ll be out until I’ve done the last house.”

“Thank you for coming yourself.”

“I haven’t done anything yet,” he said, and the window went up.

He called me at ten past eight. He did not say hello. He said, “Nine of nine are on. The Lindgrens’ oxygen was running on the battery, and Walt Heggen’s house was at fifty-three. They’re all right.”

“Thank you.”

“I wanted you to hear it from me.”

I told my mother. She had the crossword out again. She nodded and filled in a word.