The Fire Boots My Uncle Kept

“Then I’d like to talk to her,” Dale said. “Not you. Her. If that’s all right.”

I handed the phone to Tessa when she came out at five.

She walked off across the gravel with it to the far end of the lot, and I watched her stand out there for twenty minutes with one hand on her hip.

When she came back to the pickup, her eyes were wet, but she was smiling.

“He wants me to come to drill Tuesday night,” she said. “He says if I like them and they like me, he’ll sign me on as a probie and finish my sign-offs himself.”

Dale’s station was a metal building out on the blacktop, two bays, with a pancake griddle in the back room and a bulletin board covered in thank-you cards from kids.

Eleven men and six women were at drill that first Tuesday night.

Six women. I stood in the doorway with my mouth open, and Dale saw me do it and laughed.

“My wife was the one who started it,” he said. “She joined in 1994 because she was tired of waiting by the scanner. We had a fight about it then. She was right, I was wrong, and now I’ve got half my best people because of her.”

Tessa went to drill every Tuesday after that.

Dale signed her on as a probationary member at the next township board meeting, and the board approved her by a voice vote that took about four seconds.

She came home that night and put her department T-shirt on over her pajamas and wore it to bed.

Ward never said a word to any of us about the boots.

Not at church, not at the gas station, not at Dad’s Sunday dinner, where he and his wife still came every other week.

Bryce wore the boots to our department’s spring pancake feed in April. He was working the griddle in them.

I saw Dad see them, and I saw Dad look down at his plate and keep eating.

I wanted to say something so badly I had to go outside and stand by the truck for a minute. I did not.

I had promised. Going around Ward was a lot harder than going through him would have been, and I did it anyway.

The last Saturday of May, Tessa took the state written test in the classroom at the training center.

The skills test was the week after. I sat in the gravel lot both days and did not read a single page of my book.

She passed them both. Pam passed too. They came out of that building together holding hands and jumping, two grown women, nineteen and fifty-one, and I cried in the pickup like a fool.

School lets out in our district the third week of May, so in June I am home.

I clean the house top to bottom and I put up rhubarb and I keep the scanner on the kitchen counter, because I always have.

It was a Thursday, a little after two in the afternoon. Mike was home that week, out in the yard working on the stock trailer.

I was standing at the sink when the tones went off for our department.

Then a minute later they went off again, for Dale’s.

“Mutual aid requested,” the dispatcher said. “Structure fire, hay barn, fully involved.” And she read off the address, and it was a mile and a half south of Ward’s place on his own road.