The Supper in the Old Fire Station

“She looks good,” he said quietly.

“You kept her,” I said.

“I just changed the oil,” he said, which is what he says about everything he’s ever fixed.

Elsie came running and asked if she could sit up in the cab, and Dad lifted her, or tried to, and I helped him, and she sat behind that big black steering wheel like she’d been born there. Dad stood on the running board and showed her the gauges.

That’s when the side door opened.

Vern Halvorsen came in first. Eighty-one years old, his cane in one hand, wearing his old navy department jacket from the 1980s, the one with the patch on the shoulder and his name stitched over the pocket. It hung on him now, but it was pressed.

Behind him was Homer, in his jacket. Then Cotton and Ray in theirs, matching, of course. Then Leroy Nowak, who’d been on the ladder crew.

Then two men I didn’t know, from the department over in the next town, who had worked mutual aid with ours for thirty years.

They kept coming. Not all at once. One or two at a time, every few minutes, the door opening and letting in the cool air and another old man in a navy jacket, some of them with their wives on their arms.

Dad climbed down off the running board slowly and turned around and looked at them. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t understand yet. I think he thought they were there for a society meeting.

By seven o’clock there were fifteen of them in the bay, standing around the folding tables in their jackets. Dad had sat down at the long table nearest the truck, because his knees had had enough, and he was looking up at them.

I went and stood beside him and put my hand on his shoulder. I could feel him shaking, just a little, the way he shook the winter after Mom died.

“What is this,” he said to me, very low.

“It’s supper, Dad,” I said. “Just supper.”

Homer took off his cap and looked around the room, and everybody went quiet, and he said the table prayer. Not a new one. The old one, the one every Lutheran kid in our county learned before they could tie their shoes. “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest, and let these gifts to us be blessed. Amen.”

“Amen,” the room said, all those deep old voices together, and the women from St. Paul’s started dishing up.

Nobody made a speech. I had been afraid somebody would, that somebody would stand up and say something about the banquet or the list or my brother. Nobody did. Not once, all night. Those men knew better.

What they did instead was smaller than a speech.

Vern walked over to the roasters with his cane, filled a plate himself, which took him a long while, and carried it across the bay to my father.

He set it down in front of him, hot beef on a bun, potatoes, gravy over everything.

“You thawed my pump in ’89,” Vern said. “The night the Kaminski barn went. Twenty-six below. Eat.”

He patted Dad once on the back and went to sit down. That was all.

Then Homer came by Dad’s chair on his way to the coffee urn. He didn’t sit. He just put a hand on the table and said, “Christmas Eve, 1994. The tanker. You came in your church clothes.”

“I changed,” Dad said.