The first thing I noticed when I opened Mom’s kitchen door was the quiet. There is a sound a farmhouse makes in January when the furnace is running, a low hum under everything, and it was not there.
The clock over the stove was ticking. The refrigerator was running. Somewhere a window rattled in the wind. But the floor registers were silent, and the air in that kitchen was cold enough that I left my parka zipped.
I said, “Mom?” not very loud, because I was afraid of what I was going to find, and I did not want to hear my own voice go up if I found it.
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Nobody answered. I set my purse on the counter beside a loaf of bread in its bag and a coffee cup with a skin of cold coffee in the bottom, and I walked through to the living room with my keys still in my hand.
She was in Dad’s old recliner, the tan one by the window that none of us had been able to talk her out of keeping. She was asleep. I knew she was asleep because I could see her chest rise and fall under that coat.
She had on her long brown winter coat, the long quilted one she wears to church in February. She had on a knit hat pulled down over her white hair. The crocheted afghan Grandma made was spread over her lap and down past her knees.
There was frost on the inside of the windows. Not on the outside, where it belongs. On the inside, a thin gray skin of it on the glass, with the snow piled white in the yard beyond.
I stood in that doorway in my red parka with the snow still melting on my shoulders, and I looked at the thermostat on the wall beside me, the old round dial Dad put in the year I graduated. The needle said fifty-eight.
My mother is eighty-two years old. She has lived alone on that farm, eight miles east of Harvey, North Dakota, since my dad passed six years ago. She is not frail, exactly. But she is eighty-two, and it had been thirty-one below the night before.
I did not wake her right away. I stood there for maybe a full minute with my keys in my hand, just watching her breathe, because my legs did not feel like they belonged to me.
My name is Laura Gentry. I am fifty-five, and I have been the 4-H coordinator for the county extension office in Bismarck for nineteen years. I spend my days with kids and calves and county fair schedules, and I do not panic easily.
I panicked a little, standing there. I will admit that. Then I put the keys in my pocket and went to look at the tank.