My husband pushed my mother’s furnace quote back across our kitchen table with one finger and said, “Your family has bled us dry, Jordana. They get nothing from us.” Eleven days later I stood at the heating company’s counter begging for a payment plan, and the woman behind it typed our last name and said, “Oh, he already paid.”
My mom is sixty-eight.
That January she was sleeping in her parka on the couch with the oven door hanging open.
When I checked her thermostat on a Sunday it said fifty-one degrees.
The quote was $1,880 for the cheapest unit they had, installed. She had $212 in checking and a jar of quarters she called her laundry fund.
I laid the paper in front of Mateusz after supper.
He didn’t pick it up.
He tapped it twice, like he was testing whether it was hot.
“We gave her four hundred for that crown,” he said.
“That was two years ago.”
“And did she pay it back?”
She’d paid back $260 of it. In tens. Folded inside birthday cards with a little heart drawn on the envelope.
I didn’t say that.
“I’ll pick up extra hours,” I said. “It’s my paycheck too.”
“Everything lands in the same account, and I’m the one who watches that account. The answer is no.”
“She’s sleeping in a COAT, Mateusz.”
“Then she should’ve planned better. Your family gets NOTHING from us. Not one more dime.”
He went back to his phone. Some man in a garage was sanding the rust off an old shovel, with the sound turned all the way up.
I sat there and listened to the sanding.
The next morning I bought two space heaters at the hardware store on my way to work and drove them over on my lunch.
Mom said she was fine.
She says she’s fine the same way she says it when her hands are too stiff to open a jar.
At two in the morning on the Wednesday she called me because both heaters had tripped the breaker and she couldn’t find the flashlight.
I drove over in my slippers.
Mateusz didn’t wake up.
He worked four Saturdays in a row that month. Overtime, he said. The warehouse was behind on a big order and they needed him on the floor.
I never saw the overtime land in the account.
I didn’t think about it. I was thinking about my mother’s pipes.
On the eleventh day I took a long lunch from the front desk and drove Mom to the one place in Cedar Rapids that said on the phone they’d do payment plans.
She brought her checkbook.
She’d already written $212 on the first line in pen, like showing up with it would help.
The woman at the counter wore a name tag that said HOPE.
“Last name?”
“Lathrop.”
She typed. Then she smiled, the way people smile when they get to hand you good news.
“Oh, you’re already in here. Installed on the fourteenth. PAID IN FULL.”
“No. We haven’t had anything put in. This is for my mother’s house.”
“Three thousand one forty,” Hope said. “Cash. Mateusz Lathrop? He was so sweet. He brought donuts for the crew.”
Mom closed her checkbook.
“What address,” I said.
Hope’s smile slid down a little. She looked at the screen, then at me, then at my mother in her parka.
“I’m really not supposed to…”
“It’s my last name. It’s my husband. What address.”
She didn’t read it out.
She turned the monitor around.
The service address was a street on the north side I’d never once had a reason to drive down.
The occupant said R. Roach.
And in the notes, typed fast and all lowercase by somebody in a hurry: customer says unit is for his mother-in-law, elderly, on oxygen, please rush.
His MOTHER-IN-LAW.
My mother was standing right beside me.
Mom read it before I did. She always reads everything before I do.
She put her hand flat on the counter and said, “Well. Somebody’s mother is warm.”
I called him from right there. Hope didn’t stop me. I think she wanted to hear it too.
He picked up on the second ring. Beeping behind him, a forklift backing up.
“Babe, I’m slammed, can I…”
“Who is R. Roach, Mateusz?”
The beeping got farther away. Like he’d walked somewhere a door could close.
“Where are you?”
“At the counter where you paid THREE THOUSAND IN CASH for somebody’s furnace. While my mother slept in her COAT.”
“Jordana. Listen to me.”
“Who does she think you’re married to?”
He didn’t answer that one. He answered something else.
“Is your mom with you?”
“Yes.”
“Put me on speaker,” he said. “Not for you. I need to talk to Irma.”
I didn’t get the chance.
Mom took the phone right out of my hand, and she didn’t sound surprised at all.
Hope’s counter
She didn’t put him on speaker. She pushed her knit hat up off one ear, held the phone there, and said, “Hello, Mateusz. How’s Ruth breathing in this cold?”
Ruth.
R. Roach had a first name, and my mother knew it.
I couldn’t hear what he said back. I could hear that it was a lot of it.
“I know which house,” Mom said. “I’ve known since November. You told me she was a coworker’s mother.”
Hope had stopped pretending to look at anything else.
“No. You listen for once. I gave you until Christmas to tell her yourself. Christmas was a month ago.”
He talked again. Mom looked past Hope at the pegboard of furnace filters on the back wall, all the sizes in a row, like she was picking one out.
“She’s standing right here. She read the note.”
A pause.
“Don’t you call me that.”
She took the phone away from her ear and looked at the screen like it had something on it. Then she handed it back to me.
He’d hung up.
Hope cleared her throat. “Ma’am. Do you still want to do the payment plan?”
Mom opened the checkbook back up and smoothed the $212 line flat with her thumb.
“Yes,” she said. “In my name.”
“I’ll need somebody with a paycheck on it too,” Hope said. “I’m sorry. It’s the rule.”
I signed under my mother. Twelve months at $139. My name, my signature, no account number but mine.
Hope tore off the yellow copy and slid it to me.
I got Mom into the passenger seat, shut her door, went around, got in, and sat there with the key in my hand.
“Mom,” I said. “Since November WHAT?”
The blue notebook
To get to November you have to know about the notebook.
Mateusz kept a spiral notebook in the console of his truck. Blue cover, held on with green painter’s tape. Every dollar we spent went in it. Gas. Groceries. The $4 I spent on a coffee at the hospital the night my dad died.
We’d been married two years when he said one person should watch the money so nothing fell through the cracks. He was good at it and I hated it, so I said fine. My check went in. His check went in. He watched.
Everybody liked that about him. My aunt called him the responsible one.
Two years ago Mom cracked a molar on a popcorn kernel. The dentist wanted $1,100 after her insurance, and she was $400 short.
Mateusz wrote the check. He didn’t even sigh about it.
That night he opened the notebook on the kitchen counter and wrote IRMA 400.
Then the birthday cards started.
Mom sent one for my birthday, one for his, one at Christmas, one on our anniversary. Every card had a ten folded inside and a heart drawn on the back flap of the envelope. She never wrote a word about the money. Just the heart.
He’d open them standing at the counter. He’d take out the ten, put it in his wallet, get the notebook, cross out the number and write the new one under it.
Four hundred. Three ninety. Three eighty.
I’d still be reading about her tomatoes and he’d already be tossing the envelope in the recycling.
By January it said 140.
The other thing you have to know is the laundry fund.
Mom’s washer died three winters back and she never replaced it. Every Saturday morning she takes the jar and rides the bus up to a laundromat on the north side, because the one by her charges $3.75 a load and that one charges $2.50 and has a bench by the front window.
“I like to watch the street,” she always says. “It’s better than TV.”
I’d never once gone with her.
Now she was in my passenger seat with the checkbook on her knees and her parka zipped to her chin, and she lifted her hand and pointed north, past the Hy-Vee sign.
“That’s my laundromat up there,” she said. “His truck parks across the street from it.”
The Saturday before Thanksgiving
It was the Saturday before Thanksgiving. She had a load of towels in the dryer and was sitting on the bench by the window with a crossword.
A gray truck with a ladder rack pulled up across the street. She knew the ladder rack because she’d watched Mateusz bolt it on in our driveway.
He got out and lifted a green oxygen tank out of the bed, the tall kind on a little cart. A woman about my age held the storm door open with her hip while he wheeled it up the steps.
“She called him Matty,” Mom said. “Out on the porch. Loud, like she does it all the time.”
Nobody calls him Matty. His own mother calls him Mateusz, all three syllables.
Mom left her towels in the dryer and crossed the street.
He came back out for a second tank and there she was at the bottom of the steps in her parka.
“He said, ‘Irma. What are you doing up here.’ Not hello. Just that.”
He told her the woman was Deanna from work. Her mother was sick and he was helping out on Saturdays.
Then he said, “Don’t go putting ideas in Jordana’s head. She’s got enough going on.”
“Did you believe him?” I said.
“I wanted to.” She turned the checkbook over. “Deanna stayed in the door the whole time. She never came down the steps. A coworker comes down the steps.”
At Thanksgiving, at our house, she caught him alone in the garage while he was taking out the trash. She asked him one question. Was there something Jordana ought to know.
“And he said, ‘You’ve got a lot of nerve, for somebody who still owes me a hundred and forty dollars.'”
I put both hands on the steering wheel.
“I told him he had until Christmas,” Mom said. “Tell you himself, or I would.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“Because what did I have? A man carrying a tank up some steps. A girl who said Matty.” She looked out the windshield. “You don’t end somebody’s marriage over a porch, Jordana. Not on a guess. I wanted to be sure first.”
Christmas came. He brought her a grocery store poinsettia and didn’t look at her once.
“I told you not to show him that paper,” Mom said. “You remember? On the phone. I said don’t ask him.”
I did remember. I thought she was being proud.
“When he said my family gets nothing,” I said. “At the table.”
“I know what he said.”
“How do you know what he said?”
She zipped the parka up the last half inch.
“Because he said it to me first, in your garage,” she said. “I open my mouth, I never get another dime.”
Randall
I dropped Mom at her house and went back to the front desk forty minutes late.
Between check-ins I opened the bank app on my phone. I’d had the login for nine years. I’d used it maybe five times, always to look at the deposits.
This time I scrolled the other way.
Every Saturday since August there was a cash withdrawal at a gas station on the north side. Three hundred dollars. Every single one.
On January twelfth there was a teller withdrawal at our branch. $3,140.
The balance was $388.
So the night he tapped Mom’s quote and said no, we’d had a little over thirty-five hundred dollars sitting there. My checks were in it. Every other Friday, right on time.
I called the warehouse from the desk phone and asked for Randall, the shift lead. His wife gave me her potato salad recipe at the company picnic.
“Hey, Jordana. He’s on the floor, you want me to grab him?”
“No. I wanted to ask about the Saturday shifts.”
“What Saturday shifts?”
Then he heard himself. It got quiet on his end.
“Yeah,” he said. “No. Saturdays. He’s been in.”
“Randall. Which Saturdays.”
A forklift backed up somewhere behind him. The same beeping I’d heard at Hope’s counter.
“Look,” he said. “We haven’t run a Saturday since the October order shipped. He asked me, if you ever called, to say he was here. I’m not getting in the middle of it.”
“I gotta go,” Randall said, and he went.
I did the only thing I could think of. I opened the app and moved $194 from the joint account to my mom’s checking. Half of what was left. Half was mine.
It went through.
Then I asked our office manager for a direct deposit form and filled in the credit union account I’d opened on my phone in the bathroom ten minutes before. Just my name on it.
She said it would take effect the next pay period. Friday after next.
I was walking back to the desk when my cell buzzed. A text from Mateusz. The bank had told him about the $194 before it even told me.
Put it back. I mean it.
Then a second one, right under it.
Do NOT go to that house.
The storm door
I picked Mom up at 5:40. It was already dark.
She was on her front step in the parka before I’d even put it in park.
“He gave my place away up there,” she said, and got in.
It took twelve minutes. Small houses, chain-link, a couple of plastic reindeer nobody had taken down.
Her laundromat was on the corner with its lights on. The bench was in the window.
Across from it was a white house with a new flue pipe sticking out the side, puffing steam into the cold in little white breaths. Every few seconds. It was the only house on the block doing that.
His truck wasn’t there.
I went up the steps. Mom came right behind me, one hand on the rail.
I knocked on the storm door.
A small woman opened the inside door. She had a clear tube under her nose that ran back into the house, and the air that came out past her was warm. It smelled like pot roast.
“Oh,” she said. “Are you from the heating people? He said somebody might come check on it.”
“No,” I said. “I’m…”
I didn’t know how to finish it on her porch.
“Are you Ruth?” Mom said.
“I’m Ruth. Come in, come in, you’re letting it out. Isn’t it wonderful? It’s finally warm in here. My son-in-law put it in.”
We stood on her rug in our coats. Ruth went to the thermostat on the hall wall and tapped it like she was showing off a grandbaby. Seventy-two.
Next to the thermostat was a picture in a dollar-store frame.
Mateusz in front of a Christmas tree, in the green sweater I bought him two years ago. A woman with dark hair holding her left hand up to the camera. A ring on it.
“That’s my Deanna,” Ruth said. “June. Once his divorce goes through. They’ve been so patient.”
Mom didn’t move.
“Poor man,” Ruth said. She sat down slowly in a recliner and fixed her tube. “That ex of his. Her whole family bled him dry. He’s been paying off her mother for years, can you believe that?”
“I can,” Mom said.
“He showed Deanna one of the cards. The mother sends him a ten-dollar bill in a birthday card. With a heart on it.” Ruth laughed a little and coughed. “Like a heart makes up for anything.”
Mom took one step to the end table by the recliner and put her hand flat on it.
“That card would be mine,” she said.
Ruth looked up at her.
Behind us, the storm door opened, and Mateusz walked in carrying a bag of rock salt.
Ruth’s living room
Deanna was right behind him with two grocery bags. She saw me, then my mother, and stopped on the mat.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Everybody stay calm. Ruth, you sit. Don’t get up.”
“Who are these people, Matty?”
“This is nothing. This is a misunderstanding. Jordana, outside. Now. We’ll talk outside.”
I didn’t go outside.
I took the bank printout out of my purse. Six pages from the front desk printer. Both our names at the top of every one.
I held it out to Deanna.
Mateusz got there first. He put his hand over it.
“Don’t. You don’t get to come into a sick woman’s house and do this. You know she’s on oxygen? You know what that furnace means to her? Her pipes froze in December. FROZE. And where were you? Where was anybody?”
“At my mother’s,” I said. “With the space heaters.”
“Your mother.” He turned and pointed at her. “Your mother has had her hand out since the day I married you. A crown. Then a furnace. It never stops with them, Dee, I told you. I finally found somebody who doesn’t take.”
Deanna set the grocery bags down on the floor.
“You said the divorce papers were at the lawyer’s,” she said.
“They are.”
“Which lawyer.”
“Dee. Not right now.”
“Which lawyer, Matty.”
He didn’t answer that one either. He went back to me, because I was the one he knew how to talk to.
“You want to do this? Fine. You walk out of here with nothing. You understand me? The account is mine. I moved it this afternoon, every cent, the minute you touched it. The truck’s mine. Go ahead. Go sleep at your mother’s in fifty degrees. See how you like it.”
Ruth was holding her tube with two fingers.
“How cold is your house?” she said to my mother.
“Fifty-one,” Mom said. “On a Sunday.”
Ruth looked at the thermostat. Then at him.
“You told me it was for us,” she said. “You told me you were all I had now.”
“It IS for you, Ruth. I bought it. Three thousand one hundred and forty dollars. Cash. I brought donuts for the crew, for God’s sake. Who does that? Does she do that?” He was pointing at me now. “I’m the one who shows up. Everybody in this room knows I’m the one who shows up.”
Deanna picked the printout up off the floor where it had fallen. She read the top of the first page. Then she flipped to the Saturdays.
“That’s your paycheck,” she said to me. “In here.”
“Some of it,” I said.
“I was going to tell you in June,” Mateusz said. He wasn’t talking to me. He was talking to Deanna, and his voice had gone soft and fast, the voice he used on the phone with the bank. “Dee. Listen. June. After the tax refund. I had it all planned. I was doing it the right way.”
“With her refund,” Deanna said.
He didn’t say anything.
“My check goes to my own account starting Friday after next,” I said. “The furnace for my mother is in my name. Hope at the counter has the paper.”
He laughed, one short laugh. “On what? A front desk?”
“Twelve months at a hundred thirty-nine.”
Mom took her hand off the end table. She buttoned the top button of her parka, which she never does, and looked at Ruth.
“I hope it stays warm for you,” she said. “I mean that.”
Then she walked to the door. I followed her.
Behind us Deanna picked the bag of rock salt up off the mat with both hands, opened the storm door, and set it outside on the porch.
“Go put it on your own steps, Matty,” she said.
The parka hook
They put Mom’s furnace in on the third of February. Two men, no donuts. She made them coffee anyway.
I’d been sleeping on her couch for two weeks by then, the one she’d slept on in her coat. My clothes were in a laundry basket by the TV. The lawyer’s retainer had eaten my first check in my own account, and the house still had my dad’s life insurance in its down payment.
The thermostat said sixty-eight.
When the installers left, Mom took the parka off, walked it to the hook by the back door, and hung it up. It was the first time I’d seen it off her since Christmas.
That Saturday was my birthday. Thirty-seven.
I came out to the kitchen and there was an envelope on the table at my spot, with a heart drawn on the back flap.
Mom was at the stove. She came over and pushed it across the table to me with one finger.
“Mom. You don’t owe me anything.”
“I know I don’t,” she said. “Open it, and then put that ten in your own account.”
If your mom says she’s fine the way mine does, go check her thermostat this week, and stay for coffee.
Family secrets and painful gestures take center stage in “Only My Mom Braided Pie Crust Like That, And She Died In The Fire” and “My Son’s Wife Brought a Notary to My Husband’s Funeral Supper”. For another birthday that reveals more than anyone expected, read “My Father-In-Law Stepped Away From Her Birthday Cake To Call His Wife’s Sister”.
