Part Five: Five Percent

I didn’t wake her up right away.

I went back out through the kitchen. I grabbed my flashlight. I walked out to the propane tank in the side yard.

The snow was up to my knees. The wind was coming off the field like knives. I couldn’t feel my face.

There’s a gauge on top of the tank. A little round dial under a metal cover, like a speedometer. It reads from zero to a hundred. Percent.

It was covered in snow and ice.

I brushed it off with my glove. I scraped the ice off the glass with my car key.

I shined the flashlight on it.

Five percent.

The needle was sitting just above the red zone.

On a five-hundred-gallon tank, that’s twenty-five gallons. In a cold snap like this, with an old furnace, that’s maybe a day. Maybe less.

And when it gets that low, the pressure drops. The furnace can’t get enough fuel to stay lit. It flickers. It cuts out.

That’s why the house was cold.

I stood there in the snow with my flashlight on that needle.

My hands were shaking. Not just from the cold.

Back inside, I went to the refrigerator.

Mom keeps everything on her refrigerator. Grandkids’ school pictures. Church bulletins. A calendar from the Harvey Farmers Elevator. Coupons she’ll never use.

And under a seed corn magnet shaped like an ear of corn, there was a delivery ticket.

It was from the co-op in Harvey. Pink carbon copy. October 19.

Delivery: 200 gallons propane.

Customer: Pamela Ruff for Elsie Heinz.

Tank reading after delivery: 47%.

I stood in my mother’s cold kitchen and read it twice.

Two hundred gallons.

A five-hundred-gallon tank fills to about four hundred. They only fill them to eighty percent, for safety. The propane needs room to expand.

So a full fill, from empty, is somewhere around three hundred and fifty to four hundred gallons.

Two hundred gallons is half.

I did the math standing there.

Last October, propane was about two dollars a gallon in Wells County. Four hundred gallons is eight hundred dollars. A top-off after Christmas, another two hundred.

With Pam’s share, that was a thousand dollars.

A fill and a top-off.

Two hundred gallons was four hundred dollars.

There had been no top-off.

I went back through the stack of papers on the refrigerator. The calendar. The church bulletins. The coupons.

I looked for another delivery ticket. December. January. Anything.

There wasn’t one.