The Dollar on the Legion Bar

“Then what are you going to do?” he asked. “Just let her have it? Let her lie to the whole town and buy a boat and you serve her walleye on Friday like nothing happened?”

“No,” I said. I had not known what I was going to do until right then. It came to me sitting there, the way the right thing sometimes does, all at once and very plain.

“I’m going to pay her,” I said.

Mike looked at me like I had lost my mind. “Pay her.”

“She says I didn’t put in my dollar that week,” I said. “So I’ll put it in. In front of everybody. Then she can look at me and tell me we’re square.”

Mike thought about that for a long time. Then he reached across the table and took my hand, and turned it over, and looked at the cracks on my knuckles from the dish sprayer like he was reading something there.

“I’m coming,” he said.

“You don’t have to.”

“I know I don’t,” he said. “I’m coming.”

I did not sleep much that night. I lay there and listened to Mike breathe and thought about Tammy, about all the Fridays, about her chin.

When Tammy was about to cry as a girl, her chin went first, a little quiver, and then she would get mad at herself for it. I thought about how I hadn’t seen her chin go in years.

I also thought about Rod. Rod had been missing Fridays all year. Rod had sold his bass boat in the spring, which nobody understood, because Rod loved that boat more than most people love their children.

I put those two things together in the dark and did not like the shape they made, and then I made myself stop thinking about it.

Friday came the way Fridays do at the Legion. The card club cleared out by two, the fryer guy came in at three to change the oil, and by five the parking lot was full of pickups and the windows were fogged from the inside. Somebody had the jukebox going with old Alabama.

Mike came in at a quarter to six, in his clean flannel, and took the stool at the far end of the bar by the pull-tab box.

He ordered a Grain Belt and a basket of walleye he did not eat. He did not say why he was there, and nobody asked him. He didn’t have to say.

Tammy came in at half past five, like always, and took her stool, third from the end, by the taps.

Rod wasn’t with her. She was wearing the blue sweatshirt from Tyler’s homecoming, the one she always wears when she wants to feel brave.

She bought a ticket from Lenny. I watched her do it from the window of the kitchen door.

She put down two dollars of her own, and she started scratching it alone with a dime from her purse, slowly, like it didn’t matter to her, like nothing mattered.

The Legion was full. Forty people, maybe more. The card club ladies had come back for supper, and the Miller boys were shooting pool in the back room, and old Harold was at his corner table with his oxygen and his coffee, the way he is every Friday until close.

I ran plates for an hour. I took orders. I brought a birthday cake out to the Hansens’ table and sang with everybody else.