The Propane Route My Cousin Locked Up

We did eleven stops that Wednesday. The sun went down behind the spruce at a quarter to five, and I pulled the bobtail into the plant yard right after, past the chained tank, and parked it where it always parks. There were about four hundred gallons left on the back.

Knute’s truck was not there, but somebody had been. There was a new sign zip-tied to the plant gate, a white piece of plastic that said Private Property, No Trespassing.

Then I drove Einar home.

Rolf had made supper. Venison chili and cornbread. He did not ask me anything until I had eaten two bowls.

Then he sat back and looked at me across our kitchen table, where the route book usually sits, and said, “Well?”

“Eleven,” I said. “Fifteen to go. Inga sold me the load at cost, Rolf. At cost. And she’s putting tomorrow’s on account.”

He shook his head slowly. “Your grandpa,” he said. “Even dead, he’s still running that route.”

I set my alarm for four. Rolf did not sleep on the couch. He said he would rather hear me go than wake up and find me gone.

At four he got up before I did and had the coffee going and two sandwiches in a sack by the door, and he walked me out to the truck in the dark.

I picked up Einar at five on Thursday.

We were at Inga’s when her grandson unlocked the gate at a quarter to seven, and the meter was rolling before the sun was all the way up over the trees.

The second ticket came to 2,290 gallons, because I still had about four hundred on board. Inga wrote it on account and would not hear about anything else.

She sent Einar out to the truck with a loaf of her cardamom bread wrapped in a dish towel.

“For the kids at the Lindahl place,” she told him. “Einar says there are three of them. Tell them it’s from an old lady who used to drive that road.”

We did twelve stops on Thursday, the most I had ever done in one day. By the middle of the afternoon, something had changed.

I could feel it at every farm I pulled into. People were coming out to meet the truck. They had heard.

At the lake place, the old widow came out on her porch in a cardigan and a stocking cap and stood there the whole time I was filling, with her arms folded tight against the cold, and when I was done she called me up the steps and handed me a twenty-dollar bill.

“You’re on budget,” I said. “You don’t owe me anything until the first.”

“It’s not for the gas,” she said. “It’s for the drive. Put it toward your diesel and don’t argue with me, I’m ninety-one years old.”

I put it in my coat pocket. I never did spend it.

At one farm, a man I had known my whole life, a retired logger with hands like baseball mitts, stood by the tank while I filled it and said, quietly, without looking at me, “You tell Knute he ought to be ashamed.”

“I’m not telling Knute anything,” I said. “I’m just filling tanks.”

He nodded like that was the right answer. Maybe it was.

When I pulled into the plant yard Thursday at a quarter to five, with the sun just going down, Knute’s pickup was sitting by the office. He was inside with the lights on.

I could see him through the little window, sitting at Grandpa’s desk, looking at something on his phone.