The thermostat on the living room wall said 58.
I stood in the doorway of my mother’s farmhouse in my red parka, car keys still in my hand, snow melting on my shoulders and dripping onto the linoleum. There was no furnace hum, just the clock on the kitchen wall ticking off the seconds.
Mom was asleep in Dad’s old brown recliner.
She had on her long brown winter coat, the one she wears to feed the cats in February. A knit hat was pulled down over her white hair. The crocheted afghan my grandmother made in 1962 lay over her lap. Her hands were folded on top of it, and they were pale, almost blue at the knuckles.
There was frost on the inside of the living room windows. Feathery white ferns of ice were growing across the glass from the corners in.
Outside, it was thirty-one below.
“Mom,” I said. My voice came out strange. “Mom.”
She didn’t move.
I crossed the room in four steps and put my hand on her cheek. It was cold. Not dead cold, thank God, but cold the way a person shouldn’t be in her own living room. I felt for the pulse in her neck the way they taught us in the first aid class at work. It was there, slow and steady.
“Mom. Wake up.”
Her eyes opened. They were cloudy for a second, then they found me, and they cleared.
“Julie? What are you doing here, honey? It’s a weeknight.”
“You didn’t answer your phone. Two nights in a row.”
“Oh.” She blinked slowly. “I must’ve had it in the other room. It’s warmer in here by the window when the sun’s out.”
The sun had gone down two hours earlier.
My name is Julie Hagen. I’m fifty-six years old. I’m a loan officer at a credit union in Bismarck, North Dakota, and I’ve spent twenty-four years looking at people’s finances. I know what it looks like when money isn’t going where it’s supposed to.
My mother is Arlene Weber. She’s eighty-two. She has lived alone on our family farm, six miles east of Harvey, ever since my father passed away four years ago.
I didn’t call my sister from that doorway. I want to explain why, because it matters to everything that came after.
Pam is my sister, and I love her. Mom begged me not to. And the propane company only needed one name on the account.
That afternoon, I made it mine.
The cold snap hit the third week of January. It came down out of Canada like a freight train. Thirty below at night, twenty below during the day, with a wind that cut through a parka like it was a bedsheet.
On Monday evening I called Mom at seven, the way I do every Monday. She didn’t answer. That wasn’t unusual. Sometimes she’s out in the barn with the cats, or she’s turned the TV up too loud for her old ears.
On Tuesday evening, I called again. No answer.
I called three more times. Then I called the Schmidts, the neighbors a mile and a half down the gravel road. Their line was busy. I found out later the cold had knocked out half the phone lines in Wells County.
My husband Steve plows roads for Burleigh County. When it storms, he plows around the clock. That week he’d been out sixteen hours a day, sleeping in four-hour shifts at the county shop.
So on Wednesday morning I called in to the credit union and told my manager I had a family emergency. I filled my gas tank, threw a sleeping bag and a thermos of coffee in the back of my Explorer, and drove out from Bismarck alone.
It’s a hundred and twenty miles from Bismarck to Harvey. On a clear day, I make it in under two hours. That morning, with blowing snow across Highway 200 and drifts creeping onto the shoulders, it took me almost three. I passed two cars in the ditch and one semi jackknifed near Hurdsfield. A state trooper waved me around it.
The whole way, I kept thinking about my father.
Walt Weber farmed that land for forty-seven years. Wheat, sunflowers, a few head of cattle. He was a quiet, square-built man who never missed church and never said a word he didn’t mean. When the doctors told him the cancer had spread, he spent his last good month getting the farm in order. He leased the cropland to the Schmidt boys on a five-year cash rent lease at $95 an acre. He put the house and the home quarter in a living trust so Mom could stay there without anything going through probate. He sat at the kitchen table with our family lawyer in Harvey, Mr. Ostrander, and signed the papers in his careful block letters.
The last thing he said to me, in the hospice room at the hospital in Harvey, was: “You four take care of your mother. Don’t let her get cold out there.”
That’s what he said. Don’t let her get cold.
I turned onto the gravel road at eleven-fifteen. The farmhouse looked the way it always looks in winter: white siding, a green roof under a foot of snow, the big shelterbelt of cottonwoods and caragana on the north side bent sideways in the wind. Mom’s old Buick was in the garage. A thin trail of footprints ran from the back door to the barn where she feeds the cats.
But there was no smoke from the chimney. And the windows were dark.
The kitchen door was unlocked, the way it always is out there. Nobody locks their doors six miles east of Harvey. I stepped inside and stopped.
No furnace hum. Just the clock.
When Mom was awake and talking, I got down on my knees beside the recliner and took both her hands in mine. They were like ice.
“Mom, how long has it been this cold in here?”
“Oh, it’s not so bad.” She tried to smile. “I’ve got my coat.”
“It’s fifty-eight degrees. There’s frost on the inside of the windows.”
“I don’t mind it cool, Julie. I never have. Your father always kept it too warm.”
“Mom.”
She looked away from me, out the frosted window.
“Pam says propane’s dear this year,” she said quietly. “I don’t want to waste it.”
I stood up. My knees cracked. I walked to the kitchen and turned on the burner of the stove to boil water for tea, because I didn’t know what else to do with my hands.
Then I put my parka back on and went outside to the propane tank.
It sits about forty yards from the house on a concrete pad, a big white five-hundred-gallon tank shaped like a submarine. Dad put it in in 1988. In January it’s always half buried in snow.
I waded through a drift up to my knees and brushed the snow off the gauge with my glove.
The needle sat at five percent.
I stood there in the wind and stared at it. My eyes were watering from the cold, or maybe something else.
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.
“I know Mark’s laid up,” I said carefully. “But Mom, this ticket says two hundred gallons. There should have been four hundred. And there should have been a top-off in January.”
“Pam said propane was expensive this year. She said she’d get another load in when it went down.”
“Propane’s two dollars a gallon, Mom. It’s about the same as last year.”
Mom didn’t answer.
