The Christmas I Rented The Fire Hall

“Two hours,” she said, over a sink full of potatoes. “Like a dentist appointment.”

“Joanne.”

“I’m just saying what you won’t.”

“That’s why I won’t. They are my grandchildren’s mother and father, and I am going to be at that door at two o’clock for the next twenty years if I am spared. I would like it to be a door that opens.”

She peeled a while.

“And the fire hall? That’s not about Amber?”

I am trying to tell you this straight, so here is what I told her.

“Sunday night it was about Amber. By Monday noon it was about Mr. Kowalski. I can’t explain it better than that.”

Joanne snorted. But she put it to the auxiliary that Thursday, and eight women signed up to cook and serve.

The gifts gave me the most trouble. Twenty dollars.

I am ashamed to say my first feeling was insult. Then I made myself sit down again with that gravy boat, so to speak, and remember last Christmas.

Last Christmas I gave Ella and Sam bicycles. Real ones, from the hardware store, assembled. Leonard and I never had much, and there was life insurance money sitting there, and I wanted to see their faces. I wheeled them out from behind the tree with bows on the handlebars.

And I remember now what I did not let myself see then. Greg and Amber had given the children new sleds. Good plastic ones. They were leaning by the door, and nobody looked at them the rest of the day.

Amber had gone into my kitchen and done dishes for forty-five minutes.

So. Twenty dollars.

I went to the hardware store and stood in the aisle a long time. For Sam, who is six and afraid of his closet, I bought a flashlight. A good metal one, the kind you can drop. It was $13.99 and the batteries came in it.

For Ella, who is nine and has started hanging around my elbow when I cook, I did not buy anything at all. I took a recipe card out of my box. Not a copy. The card. It is in my mother’s handwriting, with a butter stain on the corner, and it is for the lefse. I bought a little wooden frame at the dollar store for $1.25 and put the card in it.

I figured that came in under the limit.

---

The family with children turned up on the twenty-third.

Dale called me at seven in the morning. “There’s a couple out on the county road, name of Peterson. Three little ones. Their furnace quit last night. He called us about the smell and we went out. Cracked heat exchanger. It’s red-tagged, they can’t run it.”

“Where are they?”

“Motel up on the highway. The part’s coming from the Cities and nobody’s installing anything till the twenty-seventh. He’s a proud kid. Works at the siding plant. He about bit my head off when I said the word dinner.”

“Give me the room number.”

“Nancy, I don’t know that he’ll…”

“I’m not going to ask him. I’m going to ask her.”

I drove up with a pan of caramel rolls. A young woman answered the door with a baby on her hip.

I did not say we would like to help. People hate that word, and they are right to.

I said, “I’m Nancy. I’m cooking at the fire hall Christmas night and I have forty pounds of potatoes and nobody to mash them. Is your husband any good with a masher?”