The Propane Tank in My Name

The Co-op in Harvey

I called the co-op from Mom’s kitchen phone at twenty to eleven. A woman named Deb answered, and I told her who I was and where the tank was and what the gauge said.

“Oh, honey,” she said. “Five percent in this? We’ll get somebody out there. It’s going to be this afternoon, though. We’ve got trucks going every direction.”

“This afternoon is fine,” I said. “As long as it’s today.”

Then I told her the rest. That the account was in my sister’s name, that I wanted to open a new one for that tank in my name, and that I would pay for the fill myself.

Deb did not make it complicated. They get this all the time, she said, families changing who handles things. She took my information and my card number and asked if I wanted to put the tank on automatic delivery.

“What does that mean, exactly?”

“Keep-full,” she said. “We track the degree days and the usage and we come out before it gets low. You don’t have to call. Nobody has to remember. A lot of our older folks are on it.”

“Yes,” I said. “I want that.”

“I’ll just need to send something to the old account holder letting her know it’s been moved,” she said. “That’s our policy.”

“That’s fine,” I said, and it was, though my stomach turned over a little when she said it.

Then I went back in and turned on the oven and left the door open, which Dad would have had a fit about, and I made Mom a cup of tea and a bowl of oatmeal and sat with her while she ate it.

What Steve Said

I called Steve on his cell while the oatmeal cooled. He works for the county road department, and during a cold snap with blowing snow they run the plows around the clock. He had been in the cab since four that morning, and I could hear the blade scraping behind his voice.

That is why I drove out alone. He wanted to come. He would have come if I had asked him to, and I would have had to explain to the county why their best operator was sitting in his mother-in-law’s kitchen.

“Is she all right?” he said, before I had even told him anything.

“She’s all right. She’s cold. The tank’s almost empty, and the heat was down to fifty-eight.” I told him about the ticket.

He was quiet for a while. Steve is quiet anyway. He was raised on a ranch near Mott, and his people do not say much until they have something to say.

“You have the co-op coming?”

“This afternoon. I put it in my name.”

“Good,” he said. “That’s right.” Then, after a minute: “You going to call Pam?”

“Mom asked me not to.”

“Then don’t,” he said. “Not today. Today you get her warm. The rest keeps.”

That is the kind of man I married. He was right, and he did not need to say it twice.

Two O’Clock

The co-op truck came up the lane at a few minutes before two. I watched it from the kitchen window. The driver was a young man, maybe thirty, with a beard full of frost by the time he had the hose out.

I went out to meet him, because I wanted to see it. He nodded at me and shouted something over the wind about it being a good thing I called, and I nodded back and stood there stamping my feet while the meter ran.

He filled it to eighty percent. Three hundred seventy-five gallons, at two dollars and nine cents a gallon. Seven hundred eighty-four dollars on my card. He handed me the ticket in a plastic sleeve, and I thanked him, and he said, “Tell your mom to stay warm,” and I said I would.

I went back inside and walked straight to that thermostat. I turned the dial past sixty, past sixty-five, and stopped it at seventy.

For a second nothing happened. Then, down in the basement, the furnace caught with a soft whump that I felt come up through the floorboards into my feet, and a minute later the registers started ticking as the metal warmed.

Mom heard it. She was in the recliner with her eyes closed, and she opened them and said, “Oh,” just that, very quietly.

I put a kettle on for more tea and started going through her cupboards to see what else she had been doing without.