The Fire Hall Breakfast Mom Took Back

The plan

Chief Rolf Engel said yes before Brian had finished the sentence.

He is sixty-three and built like a grain bin, and he had eaten Mom’s breakfast at the church every October for thirty-five years. The only condition he put on it was that the fire department not charge a dime for anything.

“No fee,” Rolf said. “Donations only, and the donations go to the department, not to you. You are not paying a cent to use my building. I’m tired of watching her get shoved around, is what I am.”

I thought that was fair. Mom did not. “I don’t want to take their business,” she said, when I told her. She was shelling walnuts at the table with her arthritic knuckles gone red from the work. “That’s not right. That’s what Shannon would do.”

“We’re not taking anybody’s business. Free is free. If people want to walk past a free breakfast and pay twenty dollars, that’s their business.”

She was quiet. She cracked another walnut. “And if nobody comes?” “Then we’ll have a lot of pancakes and a very full fire department.”

She smiled a little at that. It was the first time she’d smiled in two weeks.

“Well,” she said. “I suppose someone has to eat the kuchen.”

I ran the numbers that night like I do at the elevator. Two hundred and forty plates, if we were lucky and the weather was good. Forty dozen eggs. A hundred and fifty pounds of sausage and potatoes. Flour and milk and oil, the percolators, the paper plates.

Nine hundred and twelve dollars, all in. I put it on my own card and didn’t tell Mom.

Marlow Locker donated the sausage, once Marlon heard whose breakfast it was for. He just loaded it into the truck and waved off the money. Then Mom’s friends started to turn up at her back door. Verna and Elsie and Jean Olmstead, and four more.

They’d quit the church kitchen. Every one of them. They hadn’t made a speech about it. They had just not signed Shannon’s volunteer sheet.

“We cook for Mabel,” Elsie said. “We don’t cook for a flyer.”

The morning

On the third Saturday of October, I got up at 2:40 in the morning.

It was thirty-four degrees and clear, and when I let the dog out the stars were so thick over the elevator that I stood there with my hand on the door for a minute. The first frost had come in that week, and the cut corn glittered when the porch light touched it.

Mom was already in my kitchen. She had let herself in. She was sitting at the table in her cream apron with her purse in her lap, ready to go.

“You didn’t sleep,” I said.

“I never do the night before.”

Brian had left at two to unlock the fire hall. When we got there at 3:15, he had both griddles hot and the overhead doors up on the bay. Two trucks were parked outside with their red lights off. The air was cold and smelled like diesel and coffee.

Rolf stood in the middle of the floor in a plain gray sweatshirt with his arms crossed, looking over the long tables he’d set out in rows.

“Where do you want her?” he said. Mom looked at the two big flat-tops. Then she walked over and set her hand on the nearest one like she was greeting a horse.

“Lord,” she said. “Look at the size of that.”

“It’s a lot of pancakes, Mabel.”

“I’ve made a lot of pancakes.” I tied her apron strings for her, because her hands wouldn’t do the knot that early. She let me. She didn’t say anything about that either.

For the next two hours we worked. I cracked eggs into three steel bowls and Brian hauled coolers. Verna and Elsie built the kuchen squares on sheet pans, and Jean ran the percolators, two big hundred-cup ones, and the whole building filled up with the smell of coffee.

Mom made the batter. She did it the way she always has, in her head, with a coffee mug for a measure and a wooden spoon with a burned handle. She didn’t look at a recipe. She doesn’t own one.

At 5:20 the sky started to go from black to a hard clean blue over the east doors. It was going to be one of those mornings when you can see every fence post in the county.

“Abby,” she said, quietly, while Brian was out at the truck. “What if they don’t come?”

“They’ll come.”

“What if they go to the church, because it’s on the flyer, and it’s what they know?”

“Then we cook for the department. And you and I get to sit down for once.”

I did not feel as sure as I sounded. Rolf had put a sandwich board out at the highway junction the night before, and a couple of the women had posted on the Marlow community page. That was all the notice we’d had. That, and the word of mouth in a town of four hundred.

At 5:30 I flipped the first pancake myself, just to test the surface. It was perfect.

By 5:40, we had four men in the line. By 5:50, we had twenty.