The Fire Boots My Uncle Kept

That spring he was running loads out of the sale barns into Nebraska and the Panhandle, gone ten and twelve days at a stretch, sleeping in the bunk behind the seat.

I called him that night and told him the whole thing. He was parked at a truck stop outside of Ogallala and I could hear the reefer units running behind him.

“I’d like to drive straight to that station and have a talk with him,” he said. “But he’s your blood, Jo, and he’s your dad’s. Your call. Whatever you decide, I’m behind you, and I’ll be home on the twentieth.”

I drive a school bus for our district.

I have driven the same country route for eleven years, sixty-two miles a day on gravel, picking up farm kids before the sun is all the way up.

I went online that Sunday night anyway, at the kitchen table after Tessa went to bed.

I read reviews for two hours. Leather or rubber. Steel toe or composite. What the safety standard number meant.

I ordered her a pair of structural leather fire boots, women’s eight, for two hundred and eighty-nine dollars plus shipping.

I paid for them out of the money I had been setting aside for new tires on the pickup.

The boots came in a big brown box on a Thursday. I put the box on her bed while she was at work and did not say anything about it.

I heard her open it from the kitchen. There was a long silence, and then she came out holding one boot in each hand like they were puppies.

“Mom,” she said. “These are the good ones.”

“Your grandpa said not the cheap ones.”

She sat down on the floor right there in the hallway and put them on over her socks and laced them all the way up.

Then she walked around the living room in them, back and forth, clomping, until our old dog barked at her.

Tessa could not stay a probationary member of Ward’s department without his signature on her training, and after that morning, she did not want to.

But anybody in Kansas can take Firefighter I.

The course is put on through the state fire training institute, and that spring the county was hosting one at the training center about forty minutes down Highway 36.

It ran twelve Saturdays, eight in the morning until five in the afternoon, plus reading at home.

When it was done, you took the state written test and the skills test, and if you passed, you were certified.

So every Saturday from the second week of March to the end of May, I got up at a quarter after five.

I made a thermos of coffee and two egg sandwiches wrapped in foil and I warmed the pickup up in the driveway.

Tessa came out with her gear bag over her shoulder and her new boots in her hand.

She would not wear them in the truck. She said she did not want to scuff them before they earned it.

We drove east in the dark, then in the gray, then in the first sun coming up over the fields. Sometimes we talked.

Mostly we did not. She read her training manual with the dome light on until the sun was up enough to read without it.

The training center was a cinder block building with a classroom, a tower, a burn building, and a gravel lot full of pickups.

Most of the other students were men in their twenties and thirties from departments all over the county.