The Birthday Party at the Fire Station

Bodie’s Dad

I called Bodie’s dad at 7:10. He drives a grain truck for an outfit out of Montgomery and had taken a load down to Louisville on Friday. He was supposed to be back by noon.

He picked up on the fourth ring, and I could hear the road noise and the radio turned low. I read him Brielle’s text, every word, and then I stopped and waited for him.

He went quiet for a long time. Long enough that I checked whether the call had dropped.

When he finally talked, his voice was low and slow, the way it gets when he is ashamed.

“I didn’t know she sent that,” he said. “I knew she wanted the pavilion. I told her you had it. I didn’t know she paid for it, and I sure didn’t know about that text.”

I believed him. He is a lot of things, but he has never been a liar, and he has always loved Bodie.

He just has a habit of letting the loudest person in the room decide things.

“I’ll be back by one,” he said. “I’ll talk to her.” I told him that was fine.

I did not tell him that talking to her at one o’clock would not unsend a text sitting in nineteen phones.

“Keely,” he said, before I hung up. “Tell him happy birthday from me. I’ll see him today. I promise I’ll see him today.” I said I would tell him, and I did.

Amos

At 7:30 I called Amos Treadway. I did not plan to.

I was looking at the refrigerator, at the picture Bodie drew in kindergarten of a fire engine with a stick-figure boy on top, and I just dialed.

Amos is the volunteer fire chief out at the township station, a little brick building with two bays that sits on the far end of the city park, across the ball fields from the pavilion.

He is sixty-two. He worked thirty-one years at the power plant and has run the volunteer department for most of that.

He and my daddy were on the same crew for nineteen of those years.

When my daddy died four years ago, Amos was one of the men who carried his casket out of the church.

He came to the hospital the day Bodie was born, still in his work boots, with a stuffed dalmatian.

He picked up on the second ring. “Keely,” he said. “Everything all right?” Nobody calls Amos at 7:30 on a Saturday unless something is wrong, and he knows it.

I told him all of it, quick and plain, the pavilion and the text and the nineteen invitations.

I could hear him breathing on the other end, and somewhere behind him a screen door slapping shut.

When I finished, he did not say anything about Brielle. He did not say anything about my ex. He asked me one question. “What time is the party?” he said.

“Two,” I said. “It was supposed to be two.”

“Then it’s at two,” he said. “We’ll have the engine pulled out front by one. You bring the boy and the cake, and we’ll take care of the rest. You’ve got the lot all afternoon.”

I asked him if he needed to clear it with somebody, the township trustee or the board. He laughed.

“We do the pancake breakfast every spring and the open house every fall,” he said. “Kids climb that engine twice a year.”

“Amos,” I said, and then I could not say anything else for a minute. He waited. He has always been good at waiting.

“Your daddy would have had the engine out before you finished asking,” he said. “Go wake that boy up.”