Five percent of a five-hundred-gallon tank is twenty-five gallons. In weather like this, an old farmhouse with drafty windows can burn through ten or twelve gallons a day if you keep it at a normal temperature. Mom had been keeping it at fifty-eight so she could stretch what was left. She’d been sleeping in her coat so she wouldn’t run out.
I knew what happened when a propane tank ran dry in North Dakota in January. The furnace quits. The pipes freeze. The house goes cold in hours. And an eighty-two-year-old woman who lives alone six miles from town could fall asleep in a recliner and not wake up.
I went back inside and took off my gloves. My hands were shaking.
On the refrigerator, under a magnet from the seed corn company shaped like an ear of corn, was the October delivery ticket from the Harvey Farmers Co-op. I pulled it off and read it.
Delivered: 200 gallons. Price: $2.04 per gallon. Total: $408.00. Account: Pam Kessler.
Two hundred gallons.
I stood in my mother’s kitchen and did the math, the way I do it at work all day.
Every October, my brothers Rob and Dean and I each send Pam $250 for Mom’s propane. Pam puts in her share too. Pam lives in Harvey, just six miles away, so she handles it. She orders the deliveries and pays the co-op.
That’s a thousand dollars a winter, enough for a full fill in October and a top-off after Christmas. A five-hundred-gallon tank fills to about four hundred gallons, since you never fill one past eighty percent. That’s how it had worked every year since Dad died. A big fill in the fall, then a top-off in January.
This year, the October delivery had been only two hundred gallons. Four hundred and eight dollars.
And there had been no top-off.
Mom came into the kitchen in her coat and hat and saw me holding the delivery ticket. She saw my face.
“Don’t you start with your sister,” she said.
“Mom…”
“I mean it, Julie.” She sat down at the kitchen table and pulled the afghan tighter around her shoulders. “She’s got enough going on.”
I knew what she meant. Pam’s husband Mark had back surgery in September. He drives truck for a grain elevator, or he did, until two discs in his lower back gave out while he was loading. The surgery was at Trinity Hospital in Minot. He hadn’t worked since.
