So I drove out from Bismarck alone.

A hundred and fifteen miles. North on Highway 83, then east on 200 through Turtle Lake and McClusky. The sky was black and enormous and full of stars so sharp they looked like broken glass. The snow on both sides of the road glowed blue in my headlights.

I passed one other car the whole way.

Part Two: The Farm

The farm is twelve miles east of Harvey, North Dakota. Eight miles off the blacktop on a gravel section-line road that the county plows maybe once a week in winter.

My grandfather homesteaded it in 1912. Three hundred and twenty acres of wheat and sunflowers and pasture. A white two-story farmhouse with green shutters. A red barn with the roof caved in on the north end. A shelterbelt of caragana and ash trees my grandmother planted against the wind.

And next to the house, a big white propane tank on concrete blocks.

Five hundred gallons. Shaped like a giant pill.

There’s no natural gas out here. There never has been.

Every farmhouse in Wells County heats with propane or fuel oil or wood. The co-op trucks drive out on the gravel roads all winter long, filling tanks. If your tank runs dry, your furnace goes out. If your furnace goes out at thirty below, your pipes freeze in a few hours.

And then you do.

I pulled into the farmyard at eleven-twenty.

The yard light was on. That was something. The kitchen window was dark.

I parked by the back door. I grabbed my flashlight and the blanket. I got out.

The cold hit me like a wall. My eyes watered and the tears froze on my lashes before I’d taken three steps.

The kitchen door was unlocked, the way it always is out there.

I pushed it open. I stepped inside.

No furnace hum.

That’s the first thing I noticed. That farmhouse has had the same furnace since 1987. It’s loud. It rumbles in the basement like a sleeping animal. You hear it every few minutes all winter long, kicking on and off.

It wasn’t running.

Just the clock.

The old Westclox on the wall above the kitchen table. The one with the rooster on the face that Dad bought at the Harvey hardware store in 1970. Ticking.

That was the only sound in the house.

I could see my breath in the kitchen.

Part Three: The Recliner

I walked through the kitchen into the living room. My boots left snow on the linoleum.

I found her in the living room.

She was asleep in Dad’s old recliner.

The brown La-Z-Boy by the picture window. The one with the cracked vinyl on the right arm and the lever that sticks. Dad sat in that chair every evening for thirty-four years. After he died, Mom started sitting there instead.

She was wearing her long brown winter coat.