The Birthday Party at the Fire Station

The Cake

The bakery called again at three. I had forgotten about the cake entirely.

I stepped into the bay to answer, and when I came back out, Penny’s mom was standing there with her keys in her hand.

“Is that the cake?” she said. I said it was.

She shook her head. “Give me your receipt,” she said. “I’ll get another mom to ride with me. You stay with him.”

I tried to tell her no. She took the receipt out of my hand.

Twenty minutes later, she and another mother came walking across the gravel from the van, the two of them carrying the sheet cake between them.

It said “Happy 7th Birthday Bodie” in red letters, with a little plastic fire truck on top that the bakery lady had added on her own, Penny’s mom said, because she heard where the party was.

They set it on the table in the bay, and Jasper found a lighter in his truck, and Amos counted out seven candles and stuck them in himself, slow, with his big fingers, one at a time.

We all sang. Fourteen kids and their mothers and two volunteer firemen sang “Happy Birthday” in an open fire bay, and Bodie stood on a folding chair in his helmet and blew all seven candles out on the first try.

Before we cut it, Amos took his cap off and said, “Let’s thank the Lord for this boy.”

We all bowed our heads. He said about one sentence, and it was enough. Then he put his cap back on.

Bodie’s Dad Comes

Bodie’s dad came walking across the ball fields at about 3:20.

I saw him coming the whole way, a big man in a work shirt with his hands in his pockets, walking slow, like he was not sure what he was walking into.

He had been at the pavilion since one. He had come back from Louisville and gone where his wife told him the party was, which was the party for his baby girl.

I don’t blame him for that part. She is his baby too.

But he had heard the horn. And then he had stood under that roof with six people and a bounce house and looked across the park at fourteen kids and a fire engine, and he had started walking.

Bodie saw him and came running across the lot in his helmet, yelling, “Daddy! I sounded the horn!” His daddy picked him up and held him longer than you usually hold a seven-year-old.

He came over to me after, with Bodie on his hip. He did not look at me right away.

He looked at the engine, and at the kids, and at the cake with half of it already gone.

“I should have stopped it,” he said. “I knew she wanted that pavilion. I should have told her no a long time ago, and I didn’t, and then I was on the road and it was done.”

“Next year you will,” I said. I did not say it mean.

I said it like a fact, and he took it like one. He nodded and set Bodie down and went to shake Amos’s hand.

He stayed about half an hour. He let Bodie show him every single thing on that engine, and he listened to all of it like he had never seen a fire engine before, which is the best thing he has ever done.