The Graduation Party in the Fire Hall

She read her the obituaries out loud, because Mom liked to know who she’d outlived.

That was the girl Rhonda said did not need a party. That was the girl who had folded a towel into a square and said thank you.

Our town has about a thousand people, a Kwik Trip, two churches, a meat market, and a volunteer fire department with a hall attached to the station.

The hall is where everything happens. Wedding dances, funeral lunches, the pancake breakfast in October.

Dale Kowalski has been chief for twenty-two years. He milks a hundred and forty cows on the Hemlock Road and still makes every fire call.

I went to see him at the station on a Thursday evening, during their training night, smelling of the care center.

“I need the hall for the twenty-fourth,” I said. “Sunday. For Brooke’s open house. I know it’s short notice.”

Dale looked at a big paper calendar on the wall that had grease on it. “It’s open,” he said. “Seventy-five dollars for town residents, and you sweep up. You need the tables out?”

“All of them,” I said. I don’t know why I said that. I had planned on forty people.

He nodded like that was a normal request. “We’ll pull the trucks out front that morning anyway, so you’ve got the whole floor,” he said.

“You’ll have the bay door open, get some air through. Brooke’s the Dairy Queen girl?”

“She is.”

“She gives my grandkids extra sprinkles,” Dale said, and wrote it on the calendar in pencil: Schaaf, open house.

I wrote him a check for seventy-five dollars, and he folded it in half and put it in his shirt pocket without looking at it, which is how men in this town handle money they are slightly embarrassed to take.

I am going to tell you what it cost, because I counted it every night at the kitchen table, and because I think other mothers will want to know it can be done.

Four doubles at time and a half came to a little over eleven hundred dollars before taxes. After taxes I had about eight hundred and fifty to work with. That was the party.

Brats came from the meat market, ten dollars a pack. Ron behind the counter gave me the bulk price without my asking.

Two big roasters of pulled pork came from a shoulder I cooked overnight in the care center’s staff kitchen, with permission, during a slow overnight shift.

My aunt Pam, my mother’s sister, said she would do the potato salad and wouldn’t hear another word about it.

My cousin Lori said she’d bring the cheese curds from the plant in Thorp, the squeaky kind, still warm if she timed it right.

The plates, the cups, the white plastic tablecloths, the streamers, and a cooler of pop came from the Walmart in Marshfield.

Maroon and gold, school colors. I spent eleven minutes in the party aisle deciding between two kinds of maroon.

I did not buy a cake. I meant to. I kept meaning to.

Every time I got to the bakery counter, the price for a full sheet made me put it off one more day. I figured bars would do. My aunt makes good bars.