The Birthday Party at the Fire Station

The Empty Lot

At 1:30 I set the cupcakes out on the tablecloth with the fire trucks on it.

At 1:40 I set out the juice boxes in rows. At 1:45 I looked at the road. Nobody was coming down it.

The grocery bakery had called at 1:15 to say the sheet cake was ready.

I told them I would be there as soon as I could. I could not leave. I could not leave Bodie sitting in that engine waiting.

At 1:50 the lot was still empty, except for my car and Amos’s truck and Jasper’s truck. My phone was in my back pocket, and I checked it again. Still two answers. Seventeen silences.

I started doing the math nobody wants to do. Brielle’s text had gone out the night before.

Mine had gone out at 7:30 that morning. That was ten hours of mothers deciding before I said a word.

And a pavilion with a bounce house and pink balloons was easier to say yes to than a gravel lot at a fire station. I knew that.

Bodie was still in the driver’s seat, turning the wheel. He had no idea.

He was driving somewhere in his head, making his engine noise, and every so often he reached up and pressed his helmet down tighter.

I did. I stood on the step and felt my throat close up, and I thought about how I was going to tell him nobody came.

Amos came over and stood beside me with his arms folded. He did not say anything for a while.

He just stood there, looking at the same empty road I was looking at, chewing on the inside of his cheek.

Then he nodded at the road behind me, back toward the gate where the township road comes in. “Keely,” he said. “Turn around.”

Who Came

I turned around. The first car was already through the gate. It was Penny’s mom in her silver van, and Penny had the window down and was waving with both arms out of it.

Behind the van was a pickup with two boys from the class in the back seat. Behind that was another car, and another.

They were coming in a line down the township road, slow, the way people drive into a funeral or a fair.

I did not count at first. I just watched them come.

Then I started counting, because I could not help it, and I kept counting while car doors slammed and kids came running across the gravel at the engine.

Fourteen. Fourteen kids out of nineteen came down that road to the township fire station on a Saturday afternoon in April, when there was a bounce house three hundred yards away with pink balloons on every post.

Penny was first out. She ran straight to the engine and stood under the driver’s door and yelled up at Bodie, “Happy birthday! Can I sit there next?” Bodie looked down at her like he had just been elected mayor.

The moms came walking behind the kids, slower, carrying gift bags. A couple of them had dads with them.

One of them came straight to me and put a hand on my arm and did not say anything at all.

Penny’s mom told me later that the moms had been texting each other all morning.

Most of them had not answered me because they were busy deciding in a different one, a smaller one, without Brielle in it.

She said it took about twenty minutes. Somebody wrote, “We were invited to Bodie’s first.” Somebody else wrote, “He handed my son the invitation himself.” That was about all the discussion there was.

Five kids did not come. Two of them were sick, which I heard about later and believed.

One family was out of town. Two went to the pavilion, and I never held it against them for a minute.