The Chili Supper at the Fire Hall

The Morning After

By eight the next morning, my aunt Nadine had a fundraiser page up online.

Nadine is my mother’s younger sister. She is 59, and she has worked at the same insurance agency in the county seat for twenty-six years.

She called me at seven that morning while we were sitting in the waiting room at the clinic, getting the kids checked for smoke. She asked me to text her a picture of them.

I sent her a picture of Josie and Wade asleep against each other on the plastic chairs, still in the fire department sweatshirts the men had put on them.

She used it at the top of the page. Under it she wrote that our family had lost everything, that the children were safe, and that any amount would help us get back on our feet.

I am not a person who asks for help. If it had been up to me, there would never have been a page at all.

But it was not up to me, and I will be honest: I was grateful. I did not know where my children were going to sleep that night.

We slept the first week on an air mattress at Clint’s brother’s place in town. Then our insurance put us in a rented farmhouse out past the grain elevator, under what they call additional living expense.

And every night, after the kids went to sleep, I sat up and read the names on that page.

One Hundred and Sixty Names

Some of the names I knew right away. Kim and the other ladies from my school kitchen gave $25 each, which I knew for a fact was a lot for every one of them.

The parts counter at the auto store where Clint buys his filters gave $100 together.

There was a farmer named Earl Lacey who gave $500. I had only ever waved at him on the road. He wrote nothing, just his name and the amount.

There were people from the church, of course. There were teachers. There was a family from the next county I had never heard of in my life, who wrote, “We had a fire in 2009. It gets better.”

There were two that said Anonymous. I cried over those two harder than any of the others, because somebody had given to us and did not even want to be thanked.

The page grew all week. By the end of January it sat at $14,000 from 160 people, and it stopped growing, because that was about everybody in the county who was going to see it.

Fourteen thousand dollars. It was more money than I had ever seen in one place in my life.

I did not know exactly how those pages worked. I knew Nadine was the one who had set it up, so the money went to her account first, and she would get it to us.

On the first of February I asked her, gently, when she thought she might be able to bring it by. We needed beds. The kids were still sleeping on the mattresses the church had loaned us.

“I’ll get it to you this week,” she said. “I’ve already moved it all over to my bank. It’s easier that way.”

And then, that Saturday, she counted three thousand dollars onto her kitchen table and told me insurance would cover the rest.