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.
Laura Bennett writes about complicated family dynamics, difficult conversations, and the quiet moments that change everything. Her stories focus on real-life tensions — inheritance disputes, strained marriages, loyalty tests — and the strength people find when they finally speak up. She believes the smallest decisions often carry the biggest consequences.