Vinnie stood in the dark kitchen for a full minute, doing math she didn't like.
Four hundred pounds of food. Six hundred people.
No power, no stove, no cooler. Six hours until breakfast.
She'd always had a plan. Forty years, and she'd always had a plan. She didn't have one now.
Then the back door opened, and a big shape filled it, with a headlamp strapped to its forehead like a coal miner.
"Mrs. Haugland," said Tank. "I've got two griddles, a propane burner, a smoker that'll hold three hundred degrees till Tuesday, and six guys from my club on their way with ice." He paused. "And you've got the best cast iron I've seen since the Army. I figure between us, we can cook every bit of that food before it turns."
Vinnie looked at him in the light of her flashlight.
"You want to cook breakfast for six hundred people," she said. "In a parking lot. In the dark. In a wildfire."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Starting at midnight."
"I've done it in a sandstorm in Iraq," Tank said. "This is nicer. Here, they don't shoot at the kitchen."
Vinnie almost laughed. She didn't.
She looked at the dark cooler. Then she looked at the man in the doorway.
Forty years she'd run that kitchen her way. Every funeral, every fish fry. She'd never once handed anybody the spoon.
She held out her flashlight.
"You run the fire," she said. "I'll run the line."
Tank grinned so wide his beard moved. "Yes, ma'am."
They cooked all night.
Tank's friends came at 12:40 in four pickups, six big tattooed men from the Bitterroot Riders motorcycle club, with every cooler in their garages packed with bagged ice from a gas station in Stevensville that had a generator. They hauled the eggs and the milk out of the warming cooler and packed them into ice chests on the loading dock. That bought time for the eggs.
The meat couldn't wait. Tank lit both griddles on the back lot and stoked the smoker until it roared. Vinnie's ladies came out of the gym in their nightgowns and robes and hairnets, without being asked.
They set up folding tables by headlights. They tied on aprons over their robes.
Vinnie stood at the center of it with a clipboard and a flashlight, giving orders.
Two hundred pounds of sausage went on the griddles, and then into Vinnie's Dutch ovens, and then into the smoker, where Tank swore it would hold hot until breakfast. Eighty pounds of bacon went into Vinnie's six cast iron skillets, set right on top of the smoker's firebox, where the heat was fiercest. The hams went into the smoker whole.
They argued the entire time.
"That skillet's too hot," Vinnie said.
"That skillet's perfect."
"You're going to burn the bacon."
"I've been cooking bacon since before you were born."
"Russell Moody, I am seventy-seven years old."
Tank stopped. He looked at her. Then he started laughing, a huge laugh that echoed off the back wall of the school, and Vinnie's ladies laughed, and the bikers laughed, and finally Vinnie laughed too, standing in a parking lot at two in the morning in the smoke.
"All right," Tank said. "You're older. The bacon's yours."
At four, they started the pancakes.
Vinnie mixed the batter by flashlight in the big steel bowls, the way she'd mixed it for a hundred and fifty funerals. The bikers flipped.
The ladies stacked. Every forty minutes, Tank checked the meat in the smoker with a thermometer and wrote the temperature on Vinnie's clipboard, because the county sanitarian had come by at one o'clock and told them to keep a record, and Vinnie Haugland did not argue with sanitarians.
At five-thirty, the eggs went on. Six hundred people's worth of scrambled eggs, in the cast iron, with salt.
Tank tasted them. He didn't say a word. He just nodded.
At six o'clock in the morning, with the sky going orange and red over the mountains, and the power still out, and the fire still burning on the ridges to the west, the back doors of the gym swung open.
Six hundred tired, scared, smoky people came out into the parking lot. Breakfast was waiting. Hot sausage.
Smoked ham. Bacon. Scrambled eggs.
Pancakes with butter and syrup. Coffee that could strip paint.
They served it off folding tables by the light of pickup headlights, with a line that wrapped all the way around the school. A big tattooed biker and a tiny church lady in a hairnet stood side by side behind the griddles, flipping pancakes and arguing about the syrup.
The power came back on Tuesday. The wind died on Wednesday. On Friday, the sheriff said people could go home.
Most of them went home to houses that were still standing. Forty-one families did not.
The next Saturday, Vinnie stood in the fellowship hall of Bitterroot Lutheran Church and looked at the sign her ladies had painted on a bedsheet and hung over the door.
Vinnie and Tank's Fire Hall Breakfast. All Proceeds to the Families Who Lost Their Homes.
"I didn't agree to that name," she said.
"I didn't either," said Tank, beside her, in an apron that said Kiss the Cook. One of her ladies had given it to him. "I'd have put my name first. Alphabetical."
"Alphabetical is Haugland and Moody, Russell. I'm still first."
Tank thought about that for a long moment. "Huh," he said.
The doors opened at seven. By noon, they'd served eleven hundred people and raised twenty-two thousand dollars, and the Bitterroot Riders had made two emergency egg runs to the grocery store in Hamilton with milk crates bungeed to their motorcycles.
At the griddle, Vinnie Haugland and Tank Moody flipped pancakes side by side in the morning light. She was seventy-seven.
He was fifty-eight. They had been arguing for nine straight days.
Neither of them had the slightest intention of stopping.