The Chili Supper at the Fire Hall

My aunt counted the money out on her kitchen table like she was paying the paper boy, three neat stacks of hundreds, and then she slid the envelope across the oilcloth to me.

“That’s three thousand, honey,” Aunt Nadine said. “Insurance will cover the rest. That’s what insurance is for. I see it every day at work.”

I looked at the envelope.

The fundraiser page she had made for us said $14,000. It said 160 people had given.

“Nadine,” I said. “Where is the rest of it?”

She folded her hands on the table. Her coffee cup had a chip on the rim, and she turned it so the chip faced away from her, the way she always did.

“It’s put back,” she said. “It’s safe. You don’t know how these claims go, Missy. I do. You’ll thank me in six months.”

I wanted to ask her more. I wanted to ask what “put back” meant, and where, and for how long. But my aunt had a way of ending a conversation by standing up, and she stood up.

“You tell those kids I love them,” she said, and she held the door for me.

I drove home on the county road with the envelope on the passenger seat. I did not open it again until I was parked in the gravel drive of a farmhouse that was not ours.

My name is Missy Rowe. I am 36 years old, and I am a cook at the elementary school in our town in southern Indiana. I have fed 300 children before noon for eleven years.

I am telling this the way it happened, including the parts where I was not as good a person as I would like to be.

The Night of the Fire

Our house burned on a Tuesday night in the middle of January.

The fire marshal said later it started in the wall behind the laundry room, an old wire that had probably been sparking a long time before it finally caught.

I woke up to the smoke alarm and to Clint already standing in the hallway with his hand on the bedroom wall.

Clint is my husband. He is 38 and a diesel mechanic at the implement dealer out on the highway, and he is the kind of man who checks the tire pressure on your car without being asked.

He went for Wade and I went for Josie. Josie is nine and sleeps like a rock.

We went out the back door in our socks. Clint had Wade under one arm like a feed sack, and Wade was crying because he had left his blanket, the green one with the tractors.

We stood in the side yard in the snow and watched the laundry room window go orange. Clint called it in on his phone.

The volunteer department came in eleven minutes. I know because I watched the clock on the phone the whole time, and I have never known eleven minutes to be that long.

The first truck was the big red engine from the hall in town. Wade stopped crying when he saw it.

They saved the garage and part of the kitchen. Everything else was water and smoke and black.

Clint’s tools were at the shop, thank God. A mechanic’s tools are worth more than most people’s cars, and if those had been in the garage we would have lost his living too.