The Propane Route My Cousin Locked Up

I walked over to my cousin. He was standing by his porch steps with his hands in his coat pockets, looking at the place where the silver pickup had been.

He did not look angry. He looked like a man who had been holding his breath for a long time and had just let it out.

“I didn’t call them, Knute,” I said. “I didn’t call anybody.”

“I know you didn’t,” he said. “That’s the worst part.”

I stood there with him a minute. Then I told him what I had come to say.

“I’ll buy your half,” I said. “Not for what the man from Duluth was offering. For what it’s worth, from the books. Over five years. Rolf and I went through it last night. It’s enough to get you caught up on the house, if you talk to the bank. You’d get a check every month.”

He looked at me. His eyes were wet. It might have been the cold.

“Why would you do that,” he said.

“Because Grandpa would have,” I said. “And because you’re my cousin. And because I’m not running that plant with a padlock on it.”

He did not say yes. He did not say no. He said he needed to think. I told him the offer would stand until Christmas.

Then I said goodbye to him, and Einar touched the brim of his cap, and we walked back to my pickup.

Knute took the chain off the tank on Monday. He did not call to tell me.

I just drove into the yard Monday morning and found it lying in the gravel by the riser, coiled up, with the brass padlock still on it and the cardboard tag still tied to the lock.

He called me the week before Thanksgiving and said yes, and we signed the papers at the bank in Cook a week after that. He is caught up on his house.

We are not close the way we were when we were kids building snow forts in the ditch, but he came to Christmas Eve at my mother’s, and he sat beside me in church, and that is a start.

I paid Inga for the second load in December, as soon as the budget plan checks came in.

She sent me back a card with a picture of a bobtail on it that her grandson had found somewhere, and inside, in that same blue cursive, she wrote: Now we’re square. Tell your grandfather when you see him.

Einar still rides with me sometimes, when the roads are clear and his knees are good.

He sits in the cab and writes the ticket numbers in Grandpa’s route book. He says it ought to keep riding along, and I think he is right.

The chalk on the Lindahl tank lasted until the first snow of December. Tove sent me a picture of it on the morning it finally washed away.

I keep it in the visor of the truck, next to the widow’s twenty-dollar bill.

That Saturday afternoon, after we left Knute’s, I dropped Einar off in Cook and drove out to the plant to check on the bobtail, because I always check on the truck after a cold night.

Somebody had unplugged its block heater cord, so I plugged it back in and sat a minute in the cab, then drove home the long way, out the lake road.

I drove past Knute’s yard. His pickup was there. The light was on in his kitchen.

I did not honk. I did not wave. I drove past my cousin’s yard in the bright cold afternoon, and I did not slow down.