He had charged me rent because he couldn’t bring himself to ask for help, and some part of him hoped I would refuse and argue so he could finally say it. Instead, I thanked him and paid. He meant to tell me when I brought the splitter back. He couldn’t. Arne had always been the one who carried everybody. Curtis had never learned how to be carried. Mrs. Engebretson had known it since he was ten.

I didn’t make a speech. I pushed the forty-five dollars back into his hand and told him to buy propane. Then I went home, loaded the rest of our oak rounds, and drove back with Ben. We split them in his yard on Arne’s splitter, and by dark there was a cord stacked against Curtis’s back wall. The next Saturday, six men from the feed store showed up with their own saws and trucks. Nobody mentioned the receipt.

Mrs. Engebretson’s son-in-law found Curtis work at the county highway garage, plowing roads that winter. By Christmas, his propane tank was full again. He told me he finally slept warm. He brought the splitter back to my shed himself and painted Arne’s name fresh on the tank. Ben helped him paint it. Then he handed me the receipt, torn neatly in half, with a jar of his late mother’s apple butter. “Family price,” he said.

Next October, Curtis split beside me and Ben. We did five cords that year, plus one for his own house. Arne’s list still hangs in the lean-to, but now there are four names on it, written in two different hands. The last one is Curtis’s own. He wrote it himself, he said, so he’d never be too proud to need it again. Mrs. Engebretson brought pie for all three of us. She said Arne would have approved.