The Graduation Party in the Fire Hall

Brooke worked a double at the Dairy Queen that Saturday, because it was Memorial Day weekend and they were slammed.

She came home at eleven smelling like the fryer and sat down across from me and started rolling buns without a word.

We rolled ham buns together until one in the morning. At some point she put her head on the table, right on her arms, and I thought she was asleep.

Then she said, “Thanks, Mom,” into her elbow, and I had to get up and check the oven so she wouldn’t see my face.

The open house was set for one to five. In central Wisconsin, a graduation open house runs all afternoon, and people go to three or four of them on the same Sunday.

You show up, you sign the book, you eat, you put a card in the basket, and you drive to the next one.

That was what I was counting on. Forty people who would stop on the way to somewhere else. Maybe fifty if the weather held.

The weather held. It was the kind of late May day that makes you forgive Wisconsin for March.

Seventy-four degrees, a breeze off the fields, the sun coming in low and gold by afternoon.

Dale’s guys had pulled the second engine out onto the apron to clear the floor, and they had left the bay door all the way up.

You could see the red fire truck through the open door, big and red in the sun, from anywhere in the hall.

I was up on a step stool by eleven, hanging maroon and gold paper streamers from the ceiling hooks, the ones they use for the wedding dances.

I’d put my hair up in a ponytail and wore the navy sundress I bought for my cousin’s wedding two summers ago, because it was the only nice thing I owned that didn’t need ironing.

Brooke wore a white sundress with little straps. She had her long brown hair down, which she almost never does, because it’s always pulled back under a visor at work.

She was going down the long tables with a box of framed photos.

She had picked them out herself. Brooke at four in a snowsuit. Brooke at nine holding a fish on the dock at Lake Arbutus.

Brooke at fifteen in her first Dairy Queen visor, grinning like she’d won a prize.

And one of her with my father, sitting on his tailgate at the county fair when she was about seven, both of them eating cream puffs and both of them with powdered sugar on their noses.

She set that one down, then picked it up and straightened it, then set it down again.

The tables had white plastic tablecloths on them, and the maroon and gold streamers hung over them. Aunt Pam’s potato salad was in the cooler.

The pulled pork was in the roasters, and the whole hall smelled like barbecue sauce and the warm concrete from the bay.

At five to one, I was still on the step stool with a streamer in my teeth when the first car door shut out front.