The Fire Hall Breakfast Mom Took Back

The line

I want to tell you about the line, because I will never forget it.

At first it was just the guys from the motel, the locals who didn’t read flyers. Then a pickup from Minnesota rolled in with a trailer full of dogs. Then another. Then a van with Iowa plates, with nine men piling out of it in blaze orange, stamping their feet and blowing on their hands.

They kept coming. By six o’clock the line went out the bay door and along the side of the building, and a few of the men were standing in the lot with their coffee, talking.

Brian stood at the end of the table with a jar. It was an old pickle jar with a slot cut in the lid, and Rolf had written on a strip of masking tape across the front that it was for the fire department. Some men put a five in. Some put a twenty. A man from Omaha put in a fifty and said he’d been coming for sixteen years.

I worked the second griddle. Mom worked the first. She didn’t say much. She flipped and flipped, and she asked every man how many cakes he wanted, and she called the young ones sweetheart and the old ones sir.

At 6:15 a big man in a camouflage cap leaned over the counter and looked at her.

“Mabel?” Mom looked up. “Yes?”

“We went by the church first,” he said. “They had a sign up. Twenty dollars a plate. Place was dead empty. Four people at one table and a lady in an apron I didn’t know, and a bunch of trays from some outfit in Huron.”

“Oh,” Mom said.

“I said to the boys, where’s Mabel? So I asked a kid at Casey’s. He said she was down here.”

“Well,” Mom said. She flipped three pancakes onto his plate. “I’m here.”

“We’ll tell the rest,” he said. He did. I saw him do it. He went back out to the lot, and he started walking the parked trucks, rapping on windows, and in ten minutes the line doubled.