“I want to keep helping Pam with her house payment until Mark’s back on his feet,” she said. “It’s my money, and that’s what I want to do with it. But I want everybody to know about it. No more secrets.”
We all agreed. Pam tried to refuse, and Mom gave her the same look she used to give us when we tried to leave the table without finishing our vegetables. Pam stopped arguing.
Then Rob stood up and went to the hook by the kitchen door, where Mom’s long brown winter coat was hanging next to Dad’s old barn jacket.
He took Mom’s coat off the hook and held it up.
“Mom,” he said, “from now on, this coat goes outside with you to feed the cats. That’s it. Not in the house. Not in Dad’s chair. If I ever hear you’re wearing it in the living room again, I’m driving over here from Mandan and burning it in the burn barrel.”
Mom laughed. It was the first real laugh I’d heard from her since January.
“Your father used to say the same kind of thing to me,” she said. “Only he threatened to burn my bathrobe because I wore it to get the mail.”
That was seven months ago.
It’s November now, and the first real cold of the winter came through last week. Twenty below on Tuesday night.
I called Mom on Tuesday evening at seven.
“What does the thermostat say, Mom?”
“Seventy,” she said. “Sixty-eight at night. Like I promised.”
“Good.”
“And Julie? The co-op truck came out in October. Kyle filled the tank all the way up. He said it was the easiest delivery on his whole route. Nobody had to call.”
“That’s the whole point, Mom.”
Pam and I talk every week now. Sometimes more. In June, she sent in the financial assistance application to Trinity Hospital. I helped her fill it out at my kitchen table over two long Saturday afternoons, gathering Mark’s disability paperwork, their tax return, their bank statements, and the mortgage letter. In August, the hospital wrote back. Because of their reduced income during Mark’s recovery, they qualified for a sixty percent reduction. Their bill dropped from $18,400 to $7,360.
Pam called me the day the letter came. She was crying so hard I could barely understand her.
