Two Cokes and a Fish Fry Menu

The Week Before

I told Russ that night. I thought he would try to talk me out of it, or call Gil and warn him. He did neither.

“She’s right,” he said. He was sitting on the edge of our bed with his work socks in his hands. “I should be the one standing there. But she’s right that it’s hers to ask.”

“You could come.”

He shook his head. “I’ve got second shift Friday. I traded for it last week before any of this.” He looked at the socks. “And Shar, if I’m there, Gil looks at me instead of her. It turns into two brothers. It ought to be him and her.”

I didn’t argue, because I thought he was right, and because a small, mean part of me did not want him there to soften it. I’m not proud of that part. I’m just telling you it was there.

All that week I went to work and counted other people’s money and smiled at them. I cashed paychecks from the mill and the hospital and the school district. I listened to a man complain about a two dollar fee for twenty minutes. I wondered how many of them had a Russ at home.

Russ was quiet all week. He picked up a Saturday shift without being asked. On Wednesday night I found him at the kitchen table with a coffee can, counting bills, and he looked up at me like a kid caught at something.

“What’s that?”

“Overtime,” he said. “Since November. I was trying to put it back.” He pushed the can toward me. “Thirty-one hundred. It’s not much.”

It wasn’t much. It was about seven percent of what was gone. But I sat down and counted it with him anyway, and when I was done, I put my hand over his on the table, and neither of us said anything.

Friday Night Fish Fry

If you did not grow up in Wisconsin, I don’t know if I can explain a Friday fish fry to you. It’s not just supper. It’s church without the sermon. It’s where you see everybody, and everybody sees you.

At Kowalczyk’s Corner Tap, it was walleye or perch or cod, beer battered, with coleslaw, rye bread, tartar sauce, and your choice of fries or potato pancakes. Old Stan Kowalczyk had started it in 1971, and in February, during Lent, there was a line out the door by five.

I picked up Grandma at a quarter to five, because she wanted to be there before the rush, while it was still light out. She was waiting inside the front door, already in her royal blue wool coat, the good one she bought for my cousin’s wedding. She had on her pearl earrings, and her white hair was set in fresh curls.

“You look beautiful, Grandma,” I said, and I meant it, and my voice shook a little.

“I look like an old woman who’s going to get her money’s worth out of a Coke,” she said. “Help me down the steps. They’re slick.”

She held my arm all the way to the truck. On the drive over she talked about sheepshead and the price of eggs and how the Lutheran church was doing a chicken booyah in March. She didn’t say a word about Gil, and neither did I.

The bar sits on the corner of Main and Third, two blocks from the river, a long brick building with plain front windows and a sign that has said the same thing since before I was born. The lot was full. I parked on the street.

Inside, it was warm and loud and smelled like fryer oil and beer and wet wool. The walls are the same honey colored wood paneling Stan put up in 1971, with an old television on a shelf in the corner.