PART 3: The Coffee Can
Those eleven weeks were agonizing. I called Mom every night. She was safe and comfortable, and the automatic monitor worked. In February Duane topped off the tank without anyone asking. “Pam still comes Sundays,” Mom told me. “She brings my groceries. She takes me to church.” “Does she talk about me?” I asked. Mom hesitated. “No,” she said.
After Steve came home from the cold snap, I would lie beside him staring at the ceiling, seeing that pink slip and its 200 gallons. Rob, Dean, and I had each sent $250 every October, pleased with ourselves for doing our part. I kept calculating: $750 from the three of us, but only $400 worth of propane. Where had the other $350 gone? And had Pam ever put in her own $250?
One night in March, Steve tried again. “Have you thought about calling her?” he asked. “She hung up on me.” “That was eight weeks ago.” “She went behind our back first,” I said. “She took our money and let Mom freeze.” Steve was quiet. “Connie,” he said. “Do you know that’s what happened?” I opened my mouth and couldn’t answer right away. “No,” I said finally. “I don’t know.” “Then maybe,” Steve said gently, “you ought to find out before Easter.” But I didn’t call. Pride, anger, and hurt kept me silent. As the second-oldest, I had always watched Pam take charge and manage Mom’s affairs from nearby while the rest of us contributed money. I did not want to make the first call.
We came back to the farm at Easter, as we always had, even when Dad was alive. Once, when Dean was in a Fargo hospital with appendicitis, we carried Easter dinner to his room. We always found a way to come together. Steve and I drove from Bismarck on Saturday afternoon. Most of the snow had melted except for grimy patches in the ditches and along the shaded north edge of the shelterbelt. Mud darkened the fields, and geese flew north under a broad blue sky. In the sunshine Mom’s propane tank looked freshly white, and the keep-full monitor blinked green.
She met us at the back door in a blue cardigan, an apron, and slippers. No coat, no hat. I checked the kitchen temperature: seventy-one degrees.
By Sunday noon the family had gathered. Ham roasted in the oven beside scalloped potatoes and green bean casserole, and rolls rose beneath a towel on the counter. Mom had baked two kuchens, peach and prune, from the German custard-pie recipe her mother taught her in that same kitchen in 1950. Rob had come from Rugby with his wife Linda, and Dean from Fargo with Kelly and their two teenagers, who were absorbed in their phones in the living room. Steve watched a Twins spring-training game with Rob’s son. Mom sat in Dad’s recliner by the sunny window with the afghan across her knees, simply because she liked it. She wasn’t cold. She needed neither hat nor coat.
Pam arrived last. I heard her tan Chevrolet Malibu, with its cracked windshield, pull into the yard, and then she appeared in the kitchen doorway. At fifty-seven she looked like Mom at that age, short and sturdy, her gray hair cropped close and practical. She wore her church outfit, a white blouse and navy skirt, and she looked more exhausted than I had ever seen her. Mark wasn’t with her.
She was carrying a cardboard box with a faded red Folgers can, the big three-pound size, balanced on top. She set both on the table in front of us, and the conversation died. Dean lowered the fork he’d been using to sneak a bite of kuchen. Rob put down his coffee. Mom turned in her chair by the window.
Pam looked first at Mom, then at me, and drew a slow breath. “I need to say something,” Pam said. “Before we eat. Before anybody says grace.” Nobody moved.
“Connie’s been waiting eleven weeks to tell you what happened in January,” Pam said. She looked at Rob and Dean. “I’m going to tell you myself. Because it’s mine to tell.”
She pried open the Folgers can. Inside were bundles of fives, tens, and twenties rolled tight with rubber bands. She poured them across the kitchen table in front of the ham platter. “Seven hundred and fifty dollars,” Pam said. Her voice was almost steady. “That’s what you three sent me in October. Two-fifty each. For Mom’s propane.”
She turned to me. “I spent four hundred of it on the delivery,” she said. “Two hundred gallons. The rest I spent on our mortgage. And our electric bill. And Mark’s prescriptions.” Rob’s face stayed blank. Dean’s mouth fell open. “And my share,” Pam said. “My two-fifty. I didn’t put it in. I didn’t have it.”
She pushed the cash toward us. “That’s all of it,” she said. “Every dollar. Plus the four hundred I spent on the delivery. I’m giving it back. So Connie can be paid back for what she put on her card.”
“Where did you get this?” I asked quietly. She looked straight at me. “I sold my sewing machine,” she said. “The Bernina. Grandma Heinz’s. And the quilt rack Dad made me. And Mark’s deer rifle.” Her voice began to break. “And I picked up Saturday shifts at the Cenex in Harvey,” she said. “Running the till. Since January.”
“Pammy,” Mom said, with a small distressed sound. “Your grandma’s machine?” Pam didn’t turn. Her eyes stayed on me.
“You were right, Connie,” she said. “To take the account. You were right to call the co-op. You were right to put it in your name.” She swallowed. “I’m the one who let Mom get cold,” she said. “Not you. Not the co-op. Me.”
Then she opened the cardboard box. It was crammed with receipts, hundreds of papers folded, stacked, and clipped, pink carbon slips beside pharmacy receipts whose thermal print had almost faded, and handwritten notes. On top lay a cheap green spiral notebook from a dollar store. She opened it and set it in front of Rob. It was a ledger in her tidy handwriting, organized by dates and amounts, going back four years to the month after Dad’s funeral.
March 2022: prescriptions from Harvey Drug, $86; groceries for Mom, $112. April 2022: a northern roof patch by the Schmidt boys, $340. May 2022: gas for Mom’s eye appointment in Minot, $45. June 2022: hearing-aid batteries, $28. July 2022: well-pump repairs, $610. The entries went on page after page. Rob turned them carefully while Dean leaned over his shoulder. October 2023: Mom’s new glasses, $290. December 2023: Christmas groceries, $180. February 2024: replacement furnace igniter, $415. August 2024: dental work, $1,100. On the last page Pam had written a total and circled it twice: $14,860.
No one spoke. Rob flipped back to the beginning, forward to the end, and back again. “Pam,” he said at last, his voice rough. “What is this?” “That’s what I’ve spent on Mom,” Pam said. “Since Dad died. Out of my own pocket. Not counting propane.” She looked around at us. “I’m not asking you to pay it back,” she said quickly. “I’m not. That’s not why I brought it.” “Then why?” Dean asked. She studied him. “Because you each sent me two-fifty a year,” she said. “Every October. And you thought that was taking care of Mom.” She touched the notebook. “This is taking care of Mom,” she said.
“I’m not trying to make anybody feel bad,” Pam said. “I’m not. I wanted to do it. She’s my mother. I live twelve miles away. Who else was going to?” She turned to me. “But in September, Mark got hurt. And he had surgery. And the elevator doesn’t pay disability. And we’ve been living on my clinic paycheck since.” Her composure began to crumble. “We were two months behind on the mortgage in October,” she said. “I’d never been behind on anything in my life.”
“When your checks came,” she said, “I sat at my kitchen table and looked at seven hundred and fifty dollars. And I looked at the mortgage letter. And I looked at Mark’s pain pills, which were three hundred dollars after insurance.” She closed her eyes. “And I called the co-op and ordered two hundred gallons,” she said. “Instead of four hundred. I thought it would last until January. I thought I’d figure out the rest by then. I thought maybe Mark would be back at work. I thought I’d get some overtime at the clinic.” She opened her eyes. “Then the cold snap came,” she said. “And it burned through twice as fast as I thought.”
“Why didn’t you call us?” Dean said. “Pam, why didn’t you just tell us?” Pam gave a short, broken laugh. “And say what?” she said. “I spent Mom’s propane money on my mortgage? I can’t afford to take care of Mom anymore? I’m the oldest and I’m the one who lives close and I’m failing?” She shook her head. “I was ashamed, Dean,” she said. “I was going to call the co-op. In January. When the cold snap started. I was going to order a top-off and put it on a credit card. I had the phone in my hand.”
Then she looked at Mom in Dad’s recliner by the window, the blue cardigan showing above the afghan. “And then Mom called me,” Pam said quietly.
