The Fire Hall Breakfast Mom Took Back

The flyer

The pheasant opener in South Dakota is the third Saturday of October. If you don’t live here, I’ll tell you what that means.

It means that for one weekend a town of four hundred and eleven people gets about six hundred extra people. They come from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois. They come in trucks with dog boxes in the back and orange vests on the dash.

They rent the lodge, or they sleep four to a room at the motel, or they sleep in a camper in a farmer’s yard. They come to walk the cut corn and the cattail sloughs and the shelterbelts with their dogs.

Shooting doesn’t start until noon on opening weekend, so the mornings are long. A man can’t hunt on an empty stomach and he can’t hunt on nothing at all before noon, so every town on the highway feeds him breakfast.

In Marlow, that breakfast was Mom’s.

Two eggs any way you like them. Pancakes from scratch, and I mean a bowl as big as a washtub. Country sausage from the Marlow Locker. Hash browns off a flat-top, crisp on the edges. And a square of her peach kuchen, because this is South Dakota and you do not leave the table without kuchen.

Ten dollars, coffee included, for the last nine years. Before that it was eight, and before that it was five, and in 1991 she charged three and handed out seconds to anyone who looked thin.

The money went to the church. Mostly it went to the roof. When the old roof gave out in 2011, the new one cost twenty-six thousand dollars, and the opener breakfast paid down more of it than any other thing we did.

Every October Mom was in that kitchen by 3:30 in the morning, in her plain cream apron, and there was never a year she did not have the first pan of pancakes up before the first truck pulled in.

The flyer showed up the first week of October. It was taped in the window at Casey’s. It was on the board at the motel. It was on the lodge’s front desk. Someone had even printed a stack and left them under the windshield wipers outside the co-op.

Pheasant Opener Breakfast, it said across the top, in a font that looked like it came with the computer. Marlow Lutheran Fellowship Hall. 5:30 to 10. Hosted by Dahl Events.

Twenty dollars a plate. I stood in the co-op parking lot holding it in my hand for a full minute, and I felt my face go hot.

My husband Brian was behind me. Brian is forty-one. He drives the fertilizer truck for the co-op, he’s a volunteer with the Marlow Fire Department, and he doesn’t say much, and he’d been standing there long enough to read it twice.

“Twenty,” he said.

“She doubled it.”

“She did.”

“Where’s Mom’s name?” He looked at the flyer a while.

“It’s not on there,” he said.

Why I didn’t just say no

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking, why didn’t Abby just call the pastor. Or stand up at the council. Or tell Shannon no to her face.

I thought about all three. I did call Pastor Eric that same afternoon.

Pastor Eric is a kind man who has served three churches at once for six years and always seems to be driving. He said the council had voted in April and the fellowship committee had authority over events. He said it was a done decision, and he would pray about it.

I believe he did. Then I went and sat in Mom’s kitchen, and she folded her hands on her oilcloth, and she said the thing that decided it.

“Abby, I want you to promise me you won’t make a scene in the church. It’s the Lord’s house. I don’t want anybody fighting in there over pancakes.”

“It’s not over pancakes, Mom.”

“It’s over pancakes to the people in the pews.” So I promised. I promised I wouldn’t raise my voice in the church, or write a letter to the council, or say one word to Shannon there.

I did not promise anything about the fire hall.