Before bed, I checked the forecast again. More cold coming. Snow behind it. I set my boots by the door, laid out a fresh pair of gloves, and left the phone on the kitchen table where I could hear it. A system like the loop does not send you a formal invitation when it needs you. It just waits for the cold to do its work, and then it lets you know.
I slept with one ear open, the way I always did in November. It was not worry, exactly. It was habit. When fourteen houses are counting on a regulator you maintain, you learn to treat a quiet night as a piece of good news you have not yet earned.
The loop had its own rhythm in cold weather, and I had learned it the way you learn a person's habits: not from a manual, but from years of paying attention. Some houses called for heat early, before dawn, when their occupants got up for work. Others waited until the evening, when the sun dropped and the walls gave back the day's cold. On a night like that first cold snap, both peaks blurred into one long demand, and the regulator never really got to rest.
I checked the vents on my own house, too, because a man who services other people's systems and neglects his own is asking for a lesson he does not need. The furnace fired cleanly. The water heater held its temperature. I wrote that down as well, in the same plain hand, because a record that only covers the dramatic nights is not a record at all.
Outside, the neighborhood was quiet in the particular way cold makes a place quiet. No one lingered on a porch. From my driveway, I could see the low-loop streets curving away, house after house, each one lit from within. I did not knock on any doors. A late visit from the propane man would have worried people more than it reassured them. The gauge, the sound, the note in pencil — that was the evening's work, and it only matters when it is done every night, whether anything is wrong or not.
Chapter 20
The call came at 1:47 in the morning, from a number I did not recognize, which is usually how emergency calls start. The voice on the other end belonged to a man named Dale, and he was trying very hard not to sound frightened while standing in a farmhouse with no heat.
"We've got nothing," he said. "Furnace won't fire. It's dropping fast in here."
"How cold inside?" I asked.
"Forty-nine when I last looked. My wife's got the kids in one room with blankets."
"What's your address?" I asked, and I was already pulling on my boots.
He lived outside Cedar Hollow, twenty miles out past the county road, where the houses sit far apart and the snow comes in sideways. The storm had already started by the time I got in the truck. The headlights showed me about ten feet of road at a time, and the rest I had to guess at. Twice I slowed to a crawl because the wind pushed snow across the asphalt in sheets, erasing the center line entirely.
I kept my mind on the sequence, because panic is useless and a checklist is not. No heat in a propane house in a storm usually means one of a handful of things: empty tank, a regulator frozen or failed, a blocked vent, a tripped safety, a furnace that finally gave up in the worst possible weather. I would find out which one when I got there. Driving faster would not change the diagnosis, and it might add a second emergency to the first.
Dale met me at the door in a coat and a knit cap, his breath visible in his own kitchen. The house smelled faintly of cold plaster and unburned fuel. The kids were in the back bedroom, as promised, under a mound of blankets, and his wife was sitting with them, reading aloud by flashlight like it was a camping trip and not a night when the temperature was falling through the floor.
"Show me the furnace," I said.
He did. I knelt down with my flashlight, checked the gas valve, checked the regulator outside with snow already piling on my shoulders, and found the problem in the feed line: ice had formed where condensation had collected at a low elbow, choking the flow to a trickle. The furnace had been trying to fire on nothing and had locked itself out, which was exactly what it was designed to do.
"It isn't dead," I told Dale. "It's starved. I can fix this."