The Propane Tank in My Name

Rob

For a while nobody said anything at all. I could hear the ham in the oven, and the clock, and the boys starting up their game again outside because they had gotten bored waiting.

Then Rob pushed his chair back a little from the table and leaned his forearms on it. He looked at the receipts. He looked at the space heater. He looked at Pam for a long time.

“You should have told us,” he said. Not loud. Rob never raises his voice. “That’s the part I don’t understand. If you’d called me in November and said we’re behind on the house, I’d have sent you something. Dean would have. Laura would have. You know that.”

“I know that,” Pam said. “That’s why I couldn’t.”

Rob nodded slowly, like that made more sense to him than he wanted it to.

“Here’s what I think,” he said. He looked around the table, at each of us, ending with Mom. “I think from here on, we all go through Laura for the propane. All of us. Pam too. She’s got it on keep-full, the co-op knows her, she’s set up. It’s done right. No offense, Pam.”

“None taken,” Pam said, and her voice broke on it.

“And I think,” Rob said, “if somebody at this table gets in a hole, they say so. Out loud. Before Mom is in her coat.”

Dean said, “Yeah,” quietly. Then he said it again, louder. “Yeah. That.”

I looked at Pam. She was standing there by the table in her Easter blouse with her hands at her sides, and I could see it cost her everything she had to stand there and not leave.

“Pam,” I said. “Sit down. Please.”

She sat. Mark reached over and put his hand on her back.

The Money

I want to tell this part honestly, because I think about it.

Pam had a check in the envelope, under the receipts. Two hundred dollars, made out to me. She pushed it across the table and said it was a start, and that she would pay the rest back by fall, and she had written down when.

I almost pushed it back. My first feeling was to push it back, to say forget it, it’s done, Mom’s warm. That is what I wanted to do, and it would have felt good for about a minute.

I did not push it back. I picked it up, and I folded it once, and I put it in my blouse pocket. Pam watched me do it, and something in her face eased. I think she needed me to take it. I think she needed it to count.

“The rest goes in the propane fund,” I said. “Next October. Same as everybody.”

“Same as everybody,” she said.

Mom unfolded her hands and put one of them flat on the space heater, as if she were checking that it was real.

“This is a good one,” she said. “Pam, this is a good heater. This is the kind your father would have bought.”

Pam put her face in her hands then, and cried, right there at the table, the way she had not cried at Dad’s funeral because she was too busy making sure everybody else had a plate.

Mom got up out of her chair. It took her a moment. She walked around the end of the table, past Dean and past the box, and she put both arms around Pam’s shoulders from behind and laid her cheek on the top of her head.

“You were always my helper,” Mom said. “You still are. Helpers need help too. You let them help you now.”