The Lights on Route 9

Route 9

Three days later I drove to Larsen to pick up Jack’s new glasses, and I took Route 9 home instead of the interstate.

I do not know why. Some part of me wanted the two-lane, the ditches full of cattails, the shelterbelts going yellow.

Eleven miles out of Nordby, where Route 9 crosses the county blacktop, there is a little gas station with a flat canopy and two pumps. Hanson’s Service. It had been there my whole life.

My dad bought gas there every Saturday when I was a girl, and Mr. Hanson used to give me a Tootsie Roll from a jar by the register.

It had been closed for two years. The windows were filmed over with dust and the pumps had plastic bags taped over the nozzles.

But there was a cardboard sign in the front window, written in marker in an old man’s careful hand: FOR SALE BY OWNER. ASK AT HOUSE.

The house was a small white one-story behind the station, with a garden gone to seed and a Buick in the drive. I sat in my car on the shoulder for a long time. Then I pulled in.

Arvid Hanson answered the door in a cardigan and house slippers. He was eighty-one and still stood straight as a fence post. He looked at me for a second over his glasses, and then he smiled.

“You’re Gordy Berg’s girl,” he said. “The one who always wanted the red Tootsie Pop instead of the Tootsie Roll.”

I had not been anybody’s girl in a long time. I nearly sat down on his step.

The station

Arvid got his coat and his keys and walked me across the gravel.

He had a ring of keys as big as a saucer, old brass and steel, some of them so worn the teeth were nearly flat. He found the right one without looking.

The door stuck, and he put his shoulder into it the way you do when you have done it ten thousand times.

Inside, it smelled like dust and old coffee and motor oil, which is a smell I would not trade for any candle in a store.

There was a counter along one side with six stools, red vinyl, two of them taped.

There was a coffee urn, a pie case with nothing in it, a cooler for pop, a rack where the chips used to be. On the wall hung a calendar from the Nordby Co-op Elevator with October 2024 still showing.

“I opened in 1966,” Arvid said. “Ran it fifty-eight years. My knees quit before I did. I could not do the winters anymore, shoveling those pumps out at five in the morning.”

He showed me the back room with the cash safe and the old tire machine. Then he showed me the stairs.

Upstairs there was an apartment: a kitchen with a window that looked straight down Route 9, a front room, two small bedrooms and a third one the size of a closet, and a bathroom with a claw-foot tub.

“I lived up here the first nine years,” he said. “Before I built the house. It is warm, because the heat from the station comes up through the floor.”

I stood in that kitchen and looked out at the road.

I could see the elevator at Nordby on one side and the water tower at Larsen on the other, and nothing between them but stubble fields and sky.

“How much?” I asked.

“Forty-eight thousand,” he said. “For the station, the apartment, the pumps and the tanks, and the acre it sits on. The house I keep.”