My grandmother cooked for that fire department for forty-one years, and nobody from it came for nine years — then the chief walked into hospice and asked what the hall was getting in her WILL.
She was eighty. The fish fry sign-up sheet on her refrigerator was still in her handwriting.
My grandfather Marvin was in the chair by the window. So was I.
Joyce ran the auxiliary kitchen from 1976 until she couldn’t do the stairs. Fish fries, the raffle, funeral lunches.
In 2017 she came down the back steps with a roaster of ziti and broke her hip. There are eleven of them.
She kept calling and asking if anybody wanted coffee.
Nobody came.
I dispatch for the county. I have toned that department out at two in the morning.
In October somebody finally scheduled a visit. Dale Pruitt asked what she wanted sung, then got onto the tanker.
“Members remember the department when they do their planning,” he said.
“Not today,” my grandfather said. He didn’t get up.
He apologized and went back to the music. Four minutes later he was back on it.
“She’d want that hall standing,” he said. “She’d want her name on something.”
Marvin told him to quit.
Dale smiled at him and KEPT TALKING.
Then she started crying.
I’m thirty-four and I had never seen her cry, not when they pinned her hip.
Marvin took the folder off the bed and opened the door.
“Don’t tell your mother I did that,” she said.
They had told us two weeks.
Instead she lasted seven months.
In December a lawyer named Kowalski came out. My grandmother had me write one line on the envelope: READ IT AT THE HALL.
She died in May. They held the lunch in the room she cooked in. Nobody opened the pickles on the pass-through.
Dale sat in the second row with his hat on his knee. He knew she had named them.
“She was one of ours,” he said.
Kowalski read the line where my grandmother named the department by its legal name. Then the one after it.
Somebody in the back laughed before they could stop it, and Dale put his hat back on.
One dollar and the roaster
Kowalski didn’t stop for the laugh. He held the page out at arm’s length, the way men his age do, and he read the rest of the sentence.
To the Ridge Valley Volunteer Fire Company Number One, Incorporated, one dollar. And the eighteen-quart roaster in the basement, if they wanted it back.
Then the line after that. Thirty-one thousand four hundred dollars to the Bethel Township Ambulance Corps. She had Kowalski put the reason in the will itself, which he told me later is not usual. The ones who came down the steps for me.
I was behind the pass-through with a pan of ham I hadn’t set out yet. I put it down on the burner that never worked and I stood there with the oven mitt still on my hand.
Somebody’s kid asked how much and got shushed.
Dale had his hat back on and his chin up like he was at a viewing. He waited until Kowalski put the page in the folder. Then he came up the middle aisle past his own men and stopped at the pass-through, on the other side of it, where people used to line up for the fish.
“That’s the hall’s money,” he said.
The sign-up sheet
The sheet on her refrigerator went up every February. Ruled paper, forty-some lines, her printing, and at the top she wrote LENT and the year and nothing else, because everybody knew what Lent meant in that township.
You put your name down for a Friday. She put her name down for all of them.
She started in 1976, when my mother was in grade school and the hall was a block building with a coal stove in it. Marvin ran with the company for twenty years and quit running when his knees went, and she never quit anything. Fish fries in the spring. The gun raffle in November. Funeral lunches whenever, on no notice, which is the part nobody counts.
Here is the part people forget about a volunteer company. The trucks are the county’s problem and the money is nobody’s. Ridge Valley bought a tanker in 1998 and paid for the down payment out of the fish.
The auxiliary had its own account at Farmers and Merchants, two signatures on it, and one of them was hers for thirty-nine years. She kept the register in a green vinyl checkbook cover in the drawer under her phone, and she wrote in it with a pencil, and she never once let the balance sit in her purse overnight. Fifty cents a pound off if you bought your haddock in January. She knew that the way other people know a birthday.
In 2017 she carried the ziti out the back door for the Mendoza boy’s funeral lunch, and the steps were wet, and she went down them.
The ambulance came from Bethel because Ridge Valley’s squad was out on a wreck at the four-way. Two of them got her onto the board at the bottom of her own steps and carried her up to the driveway because the gurney wouldn’t come down. One of them was a girl about my age who kept telling her the ziti was fine, the ziti made it.
The ziti did make it. Somebody took it to the hall.
She was seventy-two, and she got her hip pinned, and she came home in six weeks with a walker she painted with nail polish so she could tell it from the loaner.
And then the phone stopped.
Nine years of Tuesdays
Not all at once. That’s the thing I want to be fair about, even now.
For a month there were calls. Then the calls were about who was doing the Friday. Then somebody else’s number was on the sign-up sheet at the hall, and that was fine, because she could not stand at a fryer for four hours on a pinned hip and she said so herself.
But she kept calling them. She’d get the hall on a Friday night when it was loud and ask if anybody wanted coffee brought over, and Marvin would sit there with the paper and not look up, and she’d hang up and say they were busy.
Nine years of that. I have the dates because dispatch keeps everything and because I am the kind of person who looks.
In 2019 I did the thing I thought would fix it. I called the non-emergency line on my day off, got Dale at the hall, told him she’d like a visit, said it plain — she cooked for you for forty years and she’s alone all day.
He said he’d put it on the agenda.
Two weeks later an envelope came to her house with the company’s return address on it. Inside was a card with a fire truck on the front and RIDGE VALLEY VFC printed in the signature line, nothing handwritten, and a second envelope folded inside the card, the kind with the little window, for the annual fund drive.
She put the card on the microwave, where it stayed until the microwave died, and she filled out the second envelope at the table with the pencil from the checkbook drawer.
Fifty dollars, twice a year, every year after that. I found nine years of carbons in the checkbook drawer when we cleaned out. Nine hundred dollars from a woman on a widow-to-be’s budget to a department that could not find her house.
I never told her I called Dale. I told my mother, once, and my mother said what she always says, which is that they’re volunteers, honey, they’ve got their own families.
“Don’t they have to ask everybody?” my grandmother said about the fund drive envelope. “It’s only fair if they ask everybody.”
The brochure under the bed
The October visit was eleven minutes long. I know because the shift change is at three and I looked at my phone when he stood up.
When Marvin took the folder off the bed, a page came out of it and went under the frame, and nobody saw it until that night when I was picking her socks up off the floor.
It was a brochure. Glossy, the kind a printer does in a run of two thousand. A picture of an engine on the front with kids on the bumper and the words YOUR LEGACY KEEPS THE DOORS OPEN. Inside there was a paragraph about bequests, a paragraph about naming opportunities, and a line for the account: Ridge Valley Fire Company Building Fund, established 2017.
Somebody had put a sticky note on the inside flap. Not for us. It said bring the plaque sheet in ballpoint.
I sat on the floor of a hospice room with a brochure in my hand and did the arithmetic that anybody in that township could have done. The hall got its new roof in 2019. The bay doors went in the year after. There is a sign in the parking lot with donor levels on it, bronze and silver and the top one they call Cornerstone, and I have driven past that sign twice a day since I was nineteen.
Established 2017. The year she fell.
Marvin was asleep in the chair with his mouth open. I put the brochure in my bag and I sat there until the aide came in at ten.
In the parking lot I called my mother and read her the line about the building fund, and she said it was a coincidence, and then she said, “Don’t go down there and make a scene at your grandmother’s funeral before she’s even dead.”
Marvin said one thing about it in the morning, over the little cup of applesauce she wouldn’t eat.
“Ask Gene,” he said. He put the spoon down. “Don’t ask her.”
The minute book
Gene Doyle has been the secretary at Ridge Valley since before I could drive. He is seventy-one, he sells feed, and he wears reading glasses on a shoelace.
I went down the first Saturday in December to give back two coffee urns of hers and to get the roaster, and he was in the back office with the space heater going and the minute book open on the desk, doing the fall meeting he’d been three months behind on.
I asked him when the auxiliary stopped.
He said it didn’t stop, it went inactive.
I asked him what inactive meant and he took his glasses off the shoelace and turned the book around on the desk toward me, which is a thing I think about a lot now. He didn’t have to do that. He turned it around and he put his finger on the page.
November 2017. Motion by D. Pruitt, seconded by G. Doyle. The Ladies Auxiliary being inactive, its account is closed and the balance transferred to the building fund of the company. And the balance, in the margin, in Gene’s own hand, because Gene puts everything in the margin.
31,400.00.
Under it, the next motion, three lines down. J. Hensley released from auxiliary duties per the insurance carrier following her injury on company business.
Injury on company business. She fell on her own back steps with their dinner in her arms and somewhere there is a form that says company business, and nobody drove four miles to tell her what she’d been released from.
“That’s the fish money,” I said.
“That’s thirty-nine years of it,” Gene said. He put his glasses back on. “Nobody wrote her. I’ve thought about it.”
I asked him for a copy and he said the book doesn’t leave the building, so I took a picture of the page with my phone, sideways, with the space heater’s cord in the corner of it. I still have that picture.
Gene walked me out to the bay and stood there with his arms folded while I put the urns in the trunk, and he told me the county had been after them for a paved apron since 2015, like that was the answer to something. Then he shut the door on the space heater room and I heard the deadbolt.
I drove to hospice with the roaster on the floor of the passenger side and I did not know what I was going to do with what was on my phone.
She was awake. She’d been awake more that week than the month before, which is a thing that happens and that nobody tells you not to hope about.
I told her. I read her the motion and I read her the number, and I said the word inactive out loud twice.
She looked at the ceiling for a while.
“Thirty-one four,” she said. “That’s about right. There was six hundred in there in March.”
She had me get the lawyer’s card off the tray. Kowalski came out the following Thursday and stayed two hours with the door shut, and after he left she was gray and pleased with herself, and she made me write the line on the envelope with a Sharpie because her hand shook.
READ IT AT THE HALL. Four inches of block letters on a legal envelope.
“Write it bigger,” she said.
The pass-through
So Dale stood on the serving side of the pass-through in May with his hat on and told me the money was the hall’s, and everybody in that room heard him, because a fire hall kitchen has a plywood ceiling and no carpet and there is nowhere for a voice to go.
“That was raised on this floor,” he said. “In this building. Our name was on every flyer. There’s forty years of men who fried that fish with her, and their wives, and none of them are in this will, are they.”
I said it was her money to give.
“It was never her money.” He looked around at the second row when he said it, at his own people, the way you do when you think the room is with you. “It went in the auxiliary account and the auxiliary is this company. That’s not me. That’s how it’s set up. Ask anybody.”
Somebody said Dale, once, from the third row, the way you say a man’s name when you want him to sit down. He kept going.
“She stopped coming. I’m sorry, but she did. Nobody put her out of anywhere. She got sick and she got hard about it, and now we’re all sitting here at her lunch getting our nose rubbed in it, and I’ve got a truck out there with a hundred and forty thousand miles on it.”
“She called every Friday,” Marvin said.
“To bring coffee.” Dale said it and then he heard it, and his jaw went a little slack, and he said the next part slower. “We had eighty people in here on a Friday. I’m not going to say I had time to take a call about coffee.”
Gene Doyle got up from the fourth row and went past him into the office and came back with the minute book, and he did not say one word to Dale. He put it open on the pass-through, on the stainless, next to the pickles nobody had opened, and he turned it around toward the room the same way he’d turned it toward me in December.
He read the motion out. Both motions. His own name on the second signature, and he read that part too, and his voice went where mine would have gone if I’d tried it.
“I seconded that,” Gene said. “I’ll be seconding it the rest of my life.”
Dale looked at the page for longer than he needed to. He is not a stupid man and he had signed that book himself, and what he said when he looked up was that a motion is a motion and the company voted it, and by then two men in the second row had their coats.
Then the ham was still in the pass-through and nobody had eaten anything and my mother was crying in the back row, and she was not crying about Dale.
Marvin got up. He is eighty-four and he gets up in stages.
He took his wallet out of his back pocket, the one with the rubber band on it, and he found a dollar bill and he flattened it on the stainless next to the minute book.
“Take it now,” he said, “so nobody has to mail it.”
August
They came for the roaster in July, six weeks after. Two of them, in a company shirt, apologetic, and they took it out to a pickup and one of them asked if the lid went with it.
The sign-up sheet is still on the refrigerator. Marvin has not taken it down and I have not asked him to. LENT and the year at the top in pencil, and forty-some lines of names that are mostly gone or moved, and the tape on the corners has gone yellow and lets go every few days, and he puts it back.
Bethel bought a powered stair chair with part of it. The girl who told my grandmother the ziti made it is a supervisor now. She came by in August with a tray of cookies she did not make, and she sat in the chair by the window and let Marvin tell her about 1998 and the tanker for forty minutes.
My mother started calling again in June. We do Sundays.
I still tone that department out. I did it three weeks ago at 2:14 in the morning for a chimney, and I said the words the way I always say them, and my hands were fine.
The freezer in her basement is empty and unplugged with the door propped open with a coffee can.
Marvin was standing at the refrigerator when I came in on Sunday, pressing the tape down with his thumb.
“Put your name on it,” he said, “and I’ll cook.”
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who has spent thirty years feeding a place for free.
For more stories about family, money, and dealing with complicated situations, check out My Husband Cleaned Out His Drill Bits and Handed Me That Can in March, Her Mother Took Nine Thousand Four Hundred Dollars. I Never Let Her Back In., and My Parents’ Names Were Crossed Off the Club’s List in Ballpoint..
