The Supper in the Old Fire Station

Our daughter Elsie, who is twelve, made a sign for the door on poster board. It said Thorsen’s Garage Supper, Everybody Welcome, and she drew a little wrench at the bottom. Marcy told her it was perfect, and it was.

I didn’t send out invitations. That was important to me. I wasn’t going to put out a list against my brother’s list, or make anybody choose between the two.

That would have turned it into exactly the kind of fight I’d promised I wouldn’t have.

What I did was stop for coffee Friday morning at the café on Main, the way I do most days before the co-op.

The same eight or nine retired men sit at the round table by the window every morning, and have for as long as I can remember.

Vern Halvorsen was there, eighty-one, who drove the pumper for nineteen years. Homer Kowalczyk, who was assistant chief under Lindgren. Cotton Peplinski and his brother Ray, who joined the same week in 1971 and have never been apart since.

I didn’t make a pitch. I just said, while I was paying, “We’re having supper for Dad tomorrow night at the old station. Hot beef. Door’s open at five if anybody’s hungry.”

Nobody said anything for a second. Vern stirred his coffee. Then Homer said, “Saturday’s the banquet.”

“I know it,” I said. “This isn’t instead of anything. It’s just supper.”

Homer looked at Vern, and Vern looked at the window, and I put my change in the jar and went to work. I had a pole down on a gravel road in Portage County and didn’t think about it again until noon.

At noon my phone buzzed, and it was a text from Cotton, who I didn’t even know had my number. It said: Ray and me will bring folding chairs from the Legion. How many.

I wrote back: I don’t know. Maybe twenty.

He wrote back: Bring forty.

I told Dad on Friday night that we were having a family supper downtown on Saturday, at the old station, because Elsie wanted to see the pumper up close.

He bought that, because Elsie has been asking to sit in that truck since she was four.

He knew about the banquet, of course. You can’t keep a thing like that from a man who has drunk coffee in the same town for seventy years. He’d known since the invitations went out.

He mentioned it only once, the week before, when I was helping him put up storm windows. He was on the ladder, and I was holding it, and he said, to the window more than to me, “Royce is having a big supper for the department.”

“I heard,” I said.

“It’s for the firemen,” Dad said. He fit the window into its track and pressed the clips. “That’s right. I was never a fireman.”

He climbed down slowly, the way he does now, one rung at a time with both hands, and he picked up the next window and didn’t say another word about it. But he didn’t hum, either, and my father always hums when he works.

That was the moment, really. Not the list. The not humming.

Saturday was one of those September days in central Wisconsin that make you forgive the whole winter in advance. Sixty-eight degrees, a little wind, the maples on Third Street just starting to turn at the tips.