“When her husband’s truck went in the ditch and they had a hundred customers and no way to haul. Your grandpa sent me up here with a load at cost every day for a week. She said she’s been waiting forty-seven years to pay it back.”
I could not say anything for a minute. I stood there in Inga’s gravel yard, holding that ticket, and I cried a little, the way you do when you have been holding something up too long.
Einar did not say a thing. He just waited until I was done, and then he said, “Your card, Marit. Then let’s go. We’re burning daylight.”
I ran my card at Inga’s counter. She shook my hand with her small hard hand and told me to come back tomorrow at the same time.
Then she walked Einar out and helped him into the cab, and she shut the door on him and patted it twice.
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A loaded bobtail drives different from an empty one. There is close to six tons of propane riding behind you, and it moves when you brake, and you feel it in the curves.
I took Highway 53 south at fifty-five and nobody passed me who did not have to.
We were back on the route by a quarter to twelve. The first stop was an old dairy farm on the county road, a place that sold its cows five years ago and now runs beef.
Their tank was at fourteen percent, a gray 500-gallon tank on concrete blocks out past the machine shed.
Every delivery goes the same way, and I could do it in my sleep. You set the brake and chock the wheels.
You pull the hose off the reel, walk it to the tank, open the dome on top, check the gauge, and thread the nozzle onto the fill valve.
Then you go back to the truck and engage the pump, and you watch the meter on the truck and the float gauge on the tank.
When the tank gets where you want it, you shut the pump down, close the nozzle, bleed off the little bit of pressure, and reel the hose back in.
At that first farm it took me twenty-two minutes from wheel chocks to wheel chocks.
The farmer came out of the shop with grease on his hands while I was reeling in.
“You’re early this month,” he said. “I thought you were coming next week.”
“Plans changed,” I said, and handed him his ticket. I did not tell him why. I did not tell anyone why that first day.
But it is a small county, and word goes where it goes.
Einar rode with me the whole afternoon. At every stop he stayed in the cab and wrote the ticket numbers in Grandpa’s old leather route book, which he had brought from his house in his coat pocket. I had not known he still had it.
It was the same book Grandpa used from 1971 to the year he gave me the truck.
Every customer’s name was in it, in his square pencil printing, with notes beside them. Dog bites. Tank behind the woodpile. Pays in cash in October. Daughter’s phone number if no answer.
“He kept it so I’d know where everybody was,” Einar said, when I asked.
“Then when he quit, I kept it so I’d remember. Seems like it ought to be riding along today.”