The Saturday We Warmed Mom’s House

This fall she had done the arithmetic at her kitchen table and decided she could be cold instead.

“Does Paul know about this?” I asked her that Tuesday, and I nodded at the space heater. “Does he know you’re sitting out here in your coat all day?”

“Paul’s got enough on him,” she said. “He asks me every Sunday how I’m doing, and I tell him fine. And I am fine. Don’t you go calling him and making a fuss, Gary.”

“When was the last time Dawn was out to the house?” I asked her.

Mom had to think about it. “The Fourth of July,” she said. “They brought a pie. It was a store pie, but it was a nice one. Cherry.”

I sat there a long while with my hands by that heater. I was angry, and I won’t pretend I wasn’t.

But I had made her a promise, and I could hear the wind working at the storm windows, looking for a way in.

It had found plenty of ways. That, at least, was a thing I could fix without breaking my word.

I went to the back bedroom closet, where Dad had put a pull-down ladder years ago.

I dragged it down and climbed up into the attic with the flashlight from my truck.

The attic was as cold as the outdoors. Between the joists lay maybe two inches of old gray rock wool, packed flat and black in places from a century of dust. I could see daylight at the eaves.

I climbed back down, brushed off my coat, told Mom I would be back, and sat in my truck in the yard with the heater running. Then I called Arlo Brandt.

Arlo is seventy, retired after forty years of carpentry, and the closest thing our men’s Sunday school class has to a foreman.

He built half the porches in our county, and he teaches our lesson when the pastor is out sick.

He drove out that same afternoon. He’s slow on ladders now, but he went up into that attic anyway and stayed a good ten minutes with my flashlight before he came back down.

“Your mother’s heating the sky, Gary,” he said, wiping his glasses on his shirttail.

“Every dollar she burns goes up through that ceiling and out the roof. I’ve seen corncribs tighter than this house.”

“What would it take to fix it?” I asked him. “Not perfect, Arlo. Just warm. Just warm enough that she can take her coat off.”

Arlo squinted at the ceiling like he could see clean through it.

“Thirty-some rolls of R-30, unfaced, laid crossways over what’s up there. Baffles at the eaves so the roof can still breathe.”

“Foam the gaps around the chimney and the plumbing stack,” he said.

“A sheet-metal dam at the chimney. Plastic on the windows. New sweeps on the doors. That’s most of it.”

“How long would it take?” I asked.

“Two men, a month of Saturdays,” he said. “A dozen men, one day. If they’ll listen to me, and if they’ll stay off their phones.”

Not counting me, our class is eleven men. We meet in the basement at St. John’s on Sunday mornings, and every Wednesday at six we eat breakfast at the café on the square, same back table, same waitress.

That Wednesday I told them. I didn’t say a word about Dawn.

I said only that my mother had been sitting in her coat in her own kitchen since September, and I needed help on Saturday.