The Propane Route My Cousin Locked Up

Then I walked over and knocked on the office door, which I had never done in my life, because it was my office too.

He opened it. He looked tired, and older, like a man who had not slept in a while.

“Twenty-three,” I said. “I’ve got three left for the morning. Tove Lindahl’s is one of them.”

“I heard,” he said. “The whole county’s been calling me.”

“Knute, take the chain off. It’s not too late. Tell the man from Duluth whatever you want to tell him, but take the chain off and let me put some gas in my own truck.”

He looked at me for a long time. I thought for a moment he might do it.

Then something in his face shut, the way a door shuts in the wind, and he said, “He’s still coming Saturday. Ten o’clock. You can come or not.”

I walked back to my truck. I did not say anything else.

There was nothing else to say, and I had learned a long time ago, from my grandfather and from Einar, that the one who keeps talking is usually the one who is losing.

Friday morning was the cover of a calendar. The sky was a hard bright blue with not one cloud in it, and the frost was so thick on the grass that the fields looked white, and every birch along the county road stood bare and silver against the sun.

Several of Thursday’s stops had been smaller 250-gallon tanks at lake places, so the load had stretched. I had about seven hundred gallons left on the truck, and three stops.

I did two of them early, a lake place and a small hobby farm, then drove out to the end of the north loop, the Lindahl place.

Tove’s farm sits at the end of a long gravel driveway with birches on both sides.

There is a red barn that her husband’s grandfather built, and a white farmhouse they are fixing up one room at a time, and out past the house, on concrete blocks, a gray 500-gallon tank.

I could see before I turned in that something was written on the house side of it.

I pulled up the drive and set the brake and climbed down. My breath came out white. The frost crunched under my boots.

I had my navy work jacket zipped over my gray hoodie and my leather gloves on, and I was still cold.

Tove came out the side door in her husband’s old canvas coat, with the baby on her hip and the other two crowding out behind her in their pajamas and boots.

“Marit,” she said. “I was going to call you this morning. The gauge was at nine.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”

The two older ones ran out ahead of her, a boy about eight and a girl about six, and stopped at the tank and stood there grinning at me, and pointed. I walked around the end of it to see.

They had written on it in sidewalk chalk. Big pink and yellow and blue letters, a little crooked, going all the way along the gray side of the tank.

Thank you Marit for our heat.

Under it, the little girl had drawn a truck. A white truck, with a round tank on the back and a squiggle that I think was supposed to be the hose.

And beside it, a person with a yellow ponytail, which was me.

“They heard me on the phone with their dad last night,” Tove said, and her voice was not steady.