The Fire Hall Breakfast Mom Took Back

Shannon

I did not see Shannon that morning. I want to say that clearly. I didn’t go to the church, and I didn’t send anyone to check on her, and I didn’t call.

I only know what I was told after.

She had ordered the food from a catering outfit in Huron, two hundred and ninety plates, because she had planned for three hundred hunters and she had been sure of it. Breakfast burritos in foil trays, and hash browns in hotel pans, and a stack of fruit cups. Two thousand three hundred and forty dollars, on her own account, under the Dahl Events name.

She had priced the whole thing at twenty dollars a plate. Four dollars of it was to go to the church for the use of the hall. The rest was to be hers.

By 7:30 she had served nineteen plates. By nine she’d served thirty-six, mostly to men who had come in the door, read the price, and decided they were too hungry to drive anywhere else.

She’d put one of her kids, a boy of twelve, at the door with a cash box. I heard later he spent most of the morning looking out the window at the line going into the fire hall across town.

I don’t know how you feel about that. I felt sorry for her boy. I still do.

The skillet

At 6:40, a green Ford came into the lot with Minnesota plates on it.

I knew that truck before the driver got out. I had seen it every October of my life, since I was a girl of nine standing on a milk crate at the church counter, pouring juice.

The man who climbed down was Gilbert Brenner, from Sioux City. He is seventy-eight. He had been hunting this county since 1989 with his brother Bertram, who died four years ago. Gilbert had walked every opener since without him. He wore the same hat and the same canvas coat with the corduroy collar.

He had something wrapped in a dish towel, held flat against his chest with both arms.

I was at the griddle with a spatula full of hash browns. I saw Mom look up and see him.

“Gilbert Brenner,” she said.

“Mabel,” he said, and his voice was rough. “I went to the church.”

“I heard.”

“I went around back first, to say hello to the kitchen door like I always do. And there was a box on the steps.”

He set the bundle down on the steel counter between us, and he opened the dish towel.

It was her skillet.

It was a fourteen-inch cast-iron skillet, black as a stove lid and smooth as glass inside, the one she had fried sausage in every opener since 1985. My father had scratched an M and an H into the bottom of the handle with a nail, the year they were married. M for Mabel and H for Heitman.