The Propane Tank in My Name

The Deal We Made

When Dad died, the four of us kids sat at that same kitchen table after the funeral lunch and worked out how we were going to keep Mom on the farm. She did not want to move to town. She was clear about that, and we were not going to make her.

There are four of us. Pam is the oldest, fifty-eight now. I am next. Rob is fifty-two and farms near Carrington with his wife and their boys. Dean is the baby at forty-nine, and he works maintenance at the hospital in Fargo.

Pam is the only one of us who stayed in Harvey. She and her husband Mark have a house on the south side of town, close to the church, close to the grocery store, about fifteen minutes from the farm on a good road.

So it made sense, everybody said, for Pam to handle the practical things. She took Mom to her appointments in Minot. She picked up the prescriptions. She paid the electric bill out of Mom’s checking account and kept an eye on the mail.

And she handled the propane. Mom’s house heats with a propane furnace off a five-hundred-gallon tank out by the old garden. The tank belongs to the co-op, and the account had been in Dad’s name, and after he passed it went into Pam’s name because she was the one in town.

Mom’s Social Security covers her groceries and her insurance and not a great deal more. Heat is the big bill out there. So every October the rest of us each sent Pam two hundred fifty dollars toward the propane, and Pam put in her share, and that was a thousand dollars.

A thousand dollars, the way Rob figured it, was enough to fill the tank in the fall and top it off once after Christmas. Rob did the figuring because Rob runs propane on his own place and knows what a winter costs. Nobody questioned it. It worked for five winters.

Every October I wrote the check, put it in an envelope with a little note for Pam, and mailed it. Some years she texted me a thumbs up. Some years she didn’t. I never thought about it again until the next October.

That is the honest truth, and I am not proud of it. I thought about the 4-H calendar and my own bills and my husband Steve’s knee. I did not think about my mother’s propane tank, because my sister was thinking about it.

Five Percent

The tank sits about forty yards from the back door. I walked out through snow up past my boots, with the wind coming across the section from the northwest so hard it took my breath. It was the kind of cold that hurts your teeth.

The gauge is under a little dome lid on top of the tank. I brushed the snow off with my mitten and lifted the lid and bent down to read it. Then I stood up, and wiped my eyes because the wind was making them water, and bent down and read it again.

Five percent.

On a five-hundred-gallon tank, five percent is about twenty-five gallons. In a cold snap, in a farmhouse that was built in 1951 and insulated by people who thought newspaper in the walls was plenty, twenty-five gallons does not last long.

I knew enough to know that if that tank ran dry, it would not be a matter of calling for a fill. They would have to come out and do a leak check before they could relight anything. In thirty-below weather, with Mom alone in that house, a day of waiting could be a very long day.

I walked back to the house faster than I walked out. In the kitchen I stood by the refrigerator to get my breath, and that was when I saw the delivery ticket.

Mom keeps everything on that refrigerator. Grandkids’ school pictures, the church bulletin, a prayer card from somebody’s funeral, a list of phone numbers in Dad’s handwriting that she will not take down. And under a seed corn magnet, the co-op ticket from October.

I took it down and held it close to read the printing. The date was the eleventh of October. Gallons delivered: two hundred. Price per gallon, total, the driver’s initials. Account name: Pam Olson.

Two hundred gallons.

A five-hundred-gallon tank gets filled to about eighty percent, which is four hundred gallons, to leave room for the gas to expand. I know that because Dad told me so when I was eleven and asked why they never filled it all the way up.

So in October, with the thousand dollars we had all sent, somebody had bought half a fill. And I was standing in my mother’s kitchen in January with frost on her windows, and there had been no top-off after Christmas.

I put the ticket on the counter. I did not crumple it. I remember being careful not to crumple it, as if it mattered.