The last thing he said to me, in the hospice room at the hospital in Harvey, was: “You four take care of your mother. Don’t let her get cold out there.”
That’s what he said. Don’t let her get cold.
I turned onto the gravel road at eleven-fifteen. The farmhouse looked the way it always looks in winter: white siding, a green roof under a foot of snow, the big shelterbelt of cottonwoods and caragana on the north side bent sideways in the wind. Mom’s old Buick was in the garage. A thin trail of footprints ran from the back door to the barn where she feeds the cats.
But there was no smoke from the chimney. And the windows were dark.
The kitchen door was unlocked, the way it always is out there. Nobody locks their doors six miles east of Harvey. I stepped inside and stopped.
No furnace hum. Just the clock.
When Mom was awake and talking, I got down on my knees beside the recliner and took both her hands in mine. They were like ice.
“Mom, how long has it been this cold in here?”
“Oh, it’s not so bad.” She tried to smile. “I’ve got my coat.”
“It’s fifty-eight degrees. There’s frost on the inside of the windows.”
“I don’t mind it cool, Julie. I never have. Your father always kept it too warm.”
“Mom.”
She looked away from me, out the frosted window.
“Pam says propane’s dear this year,” she said quietly. “I don’t want to waste it.”
I stood up. My knees cracked. I walked to the kitchen and turned on the burner of the stove to boil water for tea, because I didn’t know what else to do with my hands.
Then I put my parka back on and went outside to the propane tank.
It sits about forty yards from the house on a concrete pad, a big white five-hundred-gallon tank shaped like a submarine. Dad put it in in 1988. In January it’s always half buried in snow.
I waded through a drift up to my knees and brushed the snow off the gauge with my glove.
The needle sat at five percent.
I stood there in the wind and stared at it. My eyes were watering from the cold, or maybe something else.
