The Coffee Can at the Station Door

Getting ready

Word got around the way it does in a small town, which is to say all at once and with no help from me.

I didn’t make a flyer. I told the women in my kitchen at school, and Lori, who runs the line next to mine, told her sister at the bank, and by Wednesday three people had stopped me at the gas station to ask what time it started.

I said five o’clock, free-will donation. When they asked why there was a second one, I said the first one went to the department, and this one was for Bryce. People filled in the rest themselves.

The Methodist women offered the cinnamon rolls before I could ask, because around here you do not serve chili without them.

Marge Olson made sixty. A rancher named Floyd I had spoken to maybe twice left two cases of crackers on my porch without knocking.

Lori and I browned the hamburger in the school kitchen on Friday after the last lunch, with the principal’s permission.

I put in more cumin than the school recipe, because nobody was going to report me to the state.

Bryce wanted a job.

“You can sit at a table and visit,” I told him. “People will want to see you.”

“I don’t want to sit,” he said. “Everybody’s going to look at my arms anyway. I’d rather they look at me while I’m doing something.”

I called the nurse at the burn clinic. She said as long as the dressings stayed clean and dry and nobody bumped him, he could carry something light.

So Bryce got the cornbread. He practiced in our kitchen on Friday night with a nine-by-thirteen pan of it, carrying it from the counter to the table, holding it out, saying, “Cornbread?”

“You don’t have to ask,” I said. “Just hold it out. They’ll take it.”

“It’s polite to ask,” he said, and he was right about that too.

The station

The fire station sits at the edge of town off the highway, a long metal building with three bay doors.

On Saturday afternoon, Dale and Mike pulled the tanker out onto the apron to make room. The red pumper stayed parked along the far wall.

Josh and three men from the feedlot set up the folding tables, eight long rows of them, with the gray metal chairs the church loans out for funerals.

Josh did not say a word the whole time except to ask where I wanted things.

I set up my serving table along the near wall, three big pots of chili on the table and a fourth keeping warm in the station kitchen.

I had on my gray work apron over a blue T-shirt, the same apron I wear at school, and my hair back in a ponytail.

Bryce had a card table of his own by the end of the line with four pans of cornbread on it.

His forearms were wrapped in fresh white gauze from the clinic that morning. He had made me cut the corners first.

“Corner pieces are the best,” he said. They had always been his. He had fought his cousins for them every Thanksgiving of his life. “I want to save them for somebody.”

At a quarter to five, Earl came in through the side door in his navy jacket, carrying a coffee can. Not the same can as the first supper, but the same kind.

When he set it on the little table by the front door, I had to turn around and stir something for a minute.