The Propane Tank in My Name

“Don’t You Start”

When I went back into the living room, Mom was awake. She was blinking at me from under that hat like she was not sure I was real.

“Laura?” she said. “What on earth. Is it Saturday?”

“It’s Wednesday, Mom,” I said. I knelt down by the recliner and took her hands out from under the afghan. They were like ice. Not cool. Ice. I held them between mine and rubbed them, the way you do a child’s after sledding.

“You didn’t answer the phone,” I said. “Two nights. I called and called.”

“Oh, the phone,” she said. “I must have been sleeping. I sleep out here now. It’s warmer by the window when the sun comes around.”

The sun had not been out in four days. I did not say that.

“Mom,” I said, “the thermostat is at fifty-eight.”

She looked at it, and then she looked at me, and I watched her decide how much to tell me. My mother has been deciding how much to tell her children for fifty-eight years.

“Pam says propane is dear this year,” she said. “She said to keep it low and it would stretch. I don’t mind it cool. I’ve got my coat.”

“The tank’s at five percent.”

She was quiet. Then she pulled her hands back, gently, and folded them on top of the afghan.

“Don’t you start with your sister,” she said. “She’s got enough going on.”

“What is going on?”

“Mark had his back done in September. You know that. He hasn’t been back to work. They have that house payment. Pam is doing the best she can.” She looked at the window. “Don’t you call her up and start something. Please, Laura. I mean it.”

I want to explain this part, because I know what some people will say. They will say, why didn’t you just call your sister right then and ask her what she did with the money. Why didn’t you call your brothers and have it out.

The answer is that Pam is my sister, and my mother was asking me, with her hands folded on that afghan, not to. And the propane company did not need Pam’s permission or mine or anybody’s. It only needed one name on the account.

I decided right there that it would be my name. Everything else could wait. My mother’s heat could not.