The Night the School Gym Opened

Dr. Thorsen, the dentist, got out last. He is the town’s one dentist, in his seventies, with a hearing aid. He handed me the box.

“I figured they’d want to brush their teeth,” he said.

That is the kind of town it is. I have lived there all of my life, and some days I forget.

By eleven, we had forty-two cots in rows on the gym floor, lined up under the basketball hoops with an aisle down the middle. The Lutheran women had taken over the kitchen window. Someone had taped a hand-lettered sign to the folding table, in marker, that said the food was free and nobody was to ask the price.

Forty drivers filed in off the bus and stood looking at the room.

They stood so quiet. Nobody wanted to be the first one to sit on a cot.

Then a woman from the church, Marjorie Peck, who is eighty-four, put a ladle in one man’s hand and said, “Well, don’t just stand there, honey, eat.”

That did it. Somebody laughed. Somebody sat down. And the room, which had been so quiet a moment ago, started to fill with the sounds of people being warm.

Dwight

At a quarter after ten, in the middle of the first serving line, Dwight came through the gym door.

He had been out in the cold. His ears were red and he had snow on his shoulders. He was still wearing the truck stop’s tan manager jacket with the company logo on the chest, and I noticed he had stopped to knock the snow off his boots on the mat before he came inside, the way his mother taught him.

He stood by the door and looked at forty people eating soup.

Then he looked at me.

“Nicole,” he said quietly. “I need to talk to you.”

“I’m in the middle of something, Dwight.”

“You can’t do this.”

“I can. I have the superintendent and the fire chief. I have forty cots, and I have the key.”

“You’re making me look like a monster.” His voice cracked on it. “I have a boss. I have a mortgage. I got a call from corporate at nine-fifteen and they said, Dwight, don’t spend a dollar, close it down.”

“Did you tell them there were forty people in the lot?”

He didn’t answer.

“Did you?”

“They said it was a weather event,” he said. “They said it was the state’s job.”

I didn’t raise my voice. I have never in my life raised my voice at a family dinner, and I wasn’t going to start in front of Marjorie Peck.

“Dwight,” I said, “go home. Sleep on it. If you want to come back in the morning and help carry cots, you can. But not tonight.”

He looked at the room. A driver from Georgia had turned around on his cot to look at him, with a bowl of soup balanced on his knee. The man didn’t say anything. He just held Dwight’s eye until Dwight looked away.

Dwight zipped his jacket and left. The door shut behind him with that long, slow hiss that gym doors make.

I stood there with my hands shaking and my knees trembling. It wasn’t until later that I realized I had held the soup ladle so tightly that it left a mark across my palm.

He did not come back in the morning. I want that on the record too.