The Supper in the Old Fire Station

I knew who wrote the list. Everybody did. My brother Royce had been sworn in as fire chief in March, when old Chief Lindgren finally retired after twenty-two years in the job.

Royce is forty-five, four years older than me. He’s been on the department since he was eighteen, and he’s good at it. He’s calm on a scene, he reads a building, and the younger guys listen to him.

During the week he’s an insurance adjuster for a company out of Stevens Point. He looks at hail damage and fender benders and kitchen fires and decides what things are worth. He likes columns that add up. He always has.

He and Dad haven’t been easy with each other for a long time. It started the year Royce turned twenty-five and Dad asked him, flat out, to take over the garage someday. Royce said no, kindly, but he said no.

Dad never got over it, not really. He didn’t yell. He’s not a yeller. He just went quiet about it, and the quiet sat between them at every Thanksgiving for twenty years, like a third person nobody would introduce.

When Dad finally sold the garage two years ago, to a young mechanic from Wausau named Jared, Royce helped with the paperwork and did a good job of it. Dad thanked him. That was about as close as they came.

I want to be fair to my brother, because he deserves fairness, and because I love him.

When I read that list, I didn’t think he was cruel. I thought he was new, and nervous, and trying very hard to get one thing right.

The department had about three thousand dollars for the banquet, between the centennial fund the auxiliary had been building for five years and a check from the township. The supper club was charging twenty-eight dollars a plate, plus the room.

That came out to around a hundred people, give or take. Royce had a hundred seats and a department with a hundred years of members, spouses, and widows.

Somebody was going to get left out, and he drew the line where the book drew it.

I waited two days before I said anything. I wanted to be sure I wasn’t saying it angry.

On the Wednesday, I drove over to Royce’s place after work. He was in the driveway putting a new blade on his mower, and he looked up and saw my face and set the wrench down on the tailgate of his truck.

“You saw the list,” he said.

“I saw it,” I said. “I’m not here to fight about it. I just want to ask you once. Is there any way to put Dad on it? I’ll pay for his plate myself.”

Royce wiped his hands on a rag for a long time. “It’s not the twenty-eight dollars, Corey. If I put Dad on, I have to put on Jared’s dad who fixed the siren, and the lady who did the books, and the Lutheran ladies who feed us at every fire.”

“So put them on.”

“I have a hundred chairs.” He folded the rag. “It’s members, life members, and spouses. I’m doing it by the book. The first thing I do as chief can’t be making an exception for my own father.”

I could hear what was under it. He was afraid of somebody saying he was the chief’s kid giving the chief’s dad a seat. He’d spent twenty-seven years on that department making sure nobody could ever say he got anything for free.