The Supper in the Old Fire Station

Marcy and her mother and four women from St. Paul’s had the roasters going in the station by three.

I set up the folding tables in the bay, two long rows on either side of the pumper, and strung the hanging bulbs Mabel had found in the society’s storage room.

When the sun went low, the light came in the tall front windows and hit the pumper and the chrome and the brass bell, and the whole bay went the color of honey. Elsie stood in the middle of it and said, “Oh,” and that was the right word.

At four, Cotton and Ray pulled up in Ray’s pickup with forty folding chairs from the Legion hall stacked in the bed. They set them up without being asked, which is how those two have done everything for fifty years.

At four thirty, my phone rang. It was Royce.

“Corey,” he said. There was a lot of noise behind him. Glasses, a band setting up. “The supper club just called me. They’ve had nineteen cancellations since yesterday. Nineteen. Most of them retirees.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said the truth. “I’m making Dad supper at the old station. Hot beef. I told the guys at coffee the door was open. That’s all I did.”

He was quiet for a while. “I’m still paying for those plates,” he said finally. Not angry. Just tired, like a man reading an estimate that came in high.

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry about that part. I didn’t ask anybody to cancel anything.”

“I know you didn’t,” he said. “That’s what makes it worse.” And he hung up.

I stood there in the bay with the phone in my hand. Marcy came over and took it from me and put it in my jacket pocket and said, “Go get your father.”

Dad was ready when I pulled in. He was sitting on the bench by his back door, wearing what he wears to everything: his gray work jacket from the garage, the one with the zipper that sticks, over a clean white T-shirt.

He’d shaved and combed what was left of his white hair around the bald top.

“I don’t know why we need to eat downtown,” he said as he got in. “There’s a perfectly good table at your house.”

“Elsie wants to sit in the pumper,” I said.

“That girl,” he said, and smiled, and looked out the window the rest of the way.

I parked on Third Street and walked him to the front, not the side door, because I wanted him to see the bay all at once.

I opened the small door set into the big wooden ones and stepped back and let him go first.

He walked in and stopped.

The tables were set with paper plates and plastic forks and white napkins, and the roasters sat steaming on a table along the back wall, and the bulbs glowed overhead. Elsie’s sign hung from the brass bell.

And the pumper sat in the middle of it all, red and shining, washed and waxed. Cotton and Ray had come down Friday night and done it by hand, and I hadn’t even known until I saw it.

Dad walked straight to the truck. He didn’t look at the food or the sign or Marcy or anybody.

He went to the pumper and put his hand flat on the front fender, the way you’d put your hand on the neck of a horse you used to own.