The Christmas I Rented The Fire Hall

“Nancy,” he said. “Everything all right?”

“I want to rent the hall.”

“Sure. When?”

“Christmas Day.”

He put the clipboard down on the bumper of the engine.

“What do you want with the hall on Christmas?”

“I want to cook.”

“For who?”

“For whoever doesn’t have a table.”

He looked at me over that mustache for a good while. Dale is not a man who hurries to the end of a thought.

“Greg and them not coming up?”

“Amber is hosting this year. I am invited from two until four.”

I said it flat and pleasant. I did not say one word more, and I want that understood. I did not stand in that fire hall and run down my daughter-in-law to a man who would see her at the Fourth of July parade.

Dale is nobody’s fool, though. He nodded slowly.

“So you’ve got a turkey and nobody to eat it.”

“I’ve got two turkeys in the chest freezer and a ham on order at the Super One. I bought them in November, before I knew.”

“Well,” he said. “Can’t have that.”

He walked me back to the little office and pulled out the rental book.

“Hall rents for a hundred and fifty,” he said. “Not to you. Leonard’s name is on that wall out there. You’re not paying to cook in Leonard’s kitchen.”

“I am not asking for a favor, Dale.”

“I know you’re not.”

“Then let me rent it like anybody else.”

I wrote out the check for a hundred and fifty dollars. He would not take it from my hand. So on my way out I folded it in half and dropped it into the old rubber fire boot that sits by the door for donations, and he watched me do it and shook his head.

Then he got out a yellow legal pad, and we sat at one of the folding tables with two cups of that terrible coffee, and we made a list of our own.

A fire chief in a small town knows who is alone. He knows which houses he has been called to, and which porch light does not come on anymore.

“Kowalski,” Dale said first. “Dorothy passed in April. Fifty-three years. He’s got a daughter in Arizona and she can’t fly up till New Year’s.”

I wrote it down. Mr. Kowalski sits in the pew behind me at church. I had sent a hot dish in April and a card in May, and then, God forgive me, I had let him turn back into the nice man in the pew behind me.

“The night nurses at the hospital,” Dale said. “Day shift too, they can’t leave, but we could run plates over. The dispatcher. Whoever’s driving plow for the county that day.”

“The deputies.”

“Two on. And my crew that’s on call. They’ll be here anyway, they may as well eat.”

By the time I left we had twenty-two names. I put a card up on the bulletin board at church and another by the carts at the Super One. It said, in my own handwriting: Christmas Dinner, Fire Hall, 5:30. No charge. Come if you would be eating alone. Come if you are working. Come if you just want to. Nancy.

---

I cooked for three weeks. Nine dozen rounds of lefse, frozen flat. Rosettes and krumkake. Wild rice stuffing from the rice Leonard’s cousin harvests up by Nett Lake.

My friend Joanne came over twice to peel. Joanne has been my friend since we were room mothers together. She runs the fire auxiliary, and she has a tongue on her.