The Fire Boots My Uncle Kept

“Same principle,” Dad said, and he put the bills in an envelope and wrote the word boots across the front in his square carpenter’s capitals, and handed it across the table.

She had signed up with our town’s volunteer department the week before.

She had wanted to since she was eight years old, since the night the Hendersons’ house caught fire and she watched from our porch as the trucks came screaming down the section line.

She was the first girl in our family who ever signed that paper. As far as anybody could remember, she was the first girl in town who ever had.

The department had a closet of old turnout coats and pants that fit her well enough, rolled at the cuffs.

What it did not have was boots. The smallest pair in the closet was a men’s twelve, and Tessa wears a women’s eight.

So Ward told her, the night she signed, that she should give him the money and he would order her boots through the department’s supplier.

He said they got a better price that way, and it would come in with the next order.

She believed him. Why wouldn’t she. He was her great-uncle and her chief, and he had been at every one of her birthday parties until she was twelve.

So she handed him Grandpa’s envelope at the station on a Tuesday night. And eleven days later she watched Bryce sit down on the running board and pull those boots on.

People ask me why I did not turn that pickup around and walk into that bay and take those boots off Bryce’s feet with my own hands.

Believe me, I thought about it. But Ward is not some stranger. Ward is my dad’s baby brother.

My grandpa died when Ward was nine, and my dad was twenty-nine, newly married, and he took that boy in and raised him alongside his own.

So instead of turning around, I drove Tessa straight out to Dad’s place. I figured if anybody had a right to be mad about that envelope, it was the man who filled it.

Dad was out in the shed working on the mower deck.

He listened to Tessa tell it, standing there with a socket wrench in his hand, and I watched his face go a shade older than it was when we pulled in.

He set the wrench down on the workbench very carefully. Then he looked at me, not at her.

“Jolie,” he said. Nobody else calls me that. “I want you to do something for me, and I know you won’t like it.”

“Dad.”

“Don’t start a war with him. Not over three hundred dollars. He’s my brother, and he’s the only one I’ve got left, and I’m too old to spend the time I have watching my family not speak at Christmas.”

“He took her money, Dad. Your money.”

“I know what he did.” His voice did not go up. Dad’s voice never goes up. “He’s scared of something. I don’t know what yet. Let him be scared. You just go around him.”

Tessa had not said a word since she finished the story. Now she said, “Go around him how, Grandpa? He’s the chief. It’s the only department in town.”

Dad picked the wrench back up. “Then it isn’t the only department in the county, is it.”

My husband, Mike, hauls cattle.