The Fire Hall Breakfast Mom Took Back

The part I think about

People ask me, in town, whether I’m glad I did it that way. Whether I wish I had gone to the council in September and made them listen.

I’m not sure that would have worked. I promised my mother I wouldn’t make a scene in the church, and I didn’t. I built a table somewhere else, I fed anyone who was hungry, and I let the whole thing show itself.

I didn’t have to say a word against Shannon. Two hundred and forty men did it for me, one plate at a time.

What I think about most is not the count, or the council vote, or even Gilbert and the skillet.

I think about Mom at 3:15 in the morning, in the fire hall, with her hand on that big cold griddle. How she looked at it like it was a stranger she’d been told to trust. And how by 6:40 she was frying sausage in a pan with her husband’s initials scratched in the handle, saying “Abby, sausage,” like it was any other Saturday.

I think about her face when the boy asked about next year. She is seventy-one. She has got maybe a dozen more openers in her if her hands hold out. I plan to be standing next to her at every one.

Next October, when the third Saturday comes around, the church kitchen will be hers again. I will drive her there at 3:15, and she will unlock the door herself, with the key that still has the red polish on it, and I will carry in the eggs.

The fire department has already asked if they can have us back for the Labor Day pancake feed.

Mom said she’d think about it. I think she’s already made up her mind.

On the Saturday after the breakfast, I drove past the fire hall on my way to the elevator. The bay doors were down, the sandwich board was gone from the junction, and the lot was empty except for one pickup parked by the side door.

It was Brian’s. He had gone in early to wipe down the griddles and put the pickle jar back on the shelf for next year.

I sat there with the engine running, looking at that big brick building, and I thought about the line out the door, and the orange vests, and my mother’s hand on a hot black pan.

Then I went to work, and I weighed other people’s corn, and I thanked God for pancakes.

I know that sounds small. It was not small to me.