Two Cokes and a Fish Fry Menu

“I didn’t know it was yours,” Gil said finally. “Russ said it was family money. He said Shari was fine with it.”

“Shari was never asked,” Grandma said. “And neither was I.”

He looked down at the bar. At the two Cokes standing there in front of her.

I had known Gil Kowalczyk for eighteen years. I had watched him run that bar the way his dad ran it: loud, generous, first to buy the round, first to put out a coffee can when somebody’s barn burned. I had never once seen him without something to say.

He was not loud now.

“I can’t give it back tonight, Flossie,” he said quietly. “I don’t have it. I want to tell you I do. It went into the cooler and the county and the distributor. It’s in the walls of this place.”

“I didn’t ask for it tonight,” Grandma said.

He looked up.

“I asked how it was doing.” She folded her hands on the bar in front of her and gave him the full attention of a woman who had raised four children on a mill worker’s pay. “And now I’d like to hear your plan.”

The Back of the Menu

For a long moment, Gil just looked at her. Then he looked out at his Friday regulars, the farmers and the mill guys and the retired teachers and the young couples with babies in high chairs, every one of them waiting to see what kind of man he was going to be.

Then he reached under the counter and came up with one of the laminated fish fry menus and a ballpoint pen. He turned the menu over to the blank side and laid it flat on the bar between them.

Grandma slid the second Coke across the bar toward him.

“Take your time, Gilbert,” she said. “I ordered that one for you.”

He looked at the bottle. Then he picked it up and took a long drink, set it down, and clicked the pen.

“Here’s what I can do,” he said, and he said it loud enough for the room, which I did not expect. “I clear about a thousand a month after the cooler payment and the taxes, if Lent is good and the Packers make the playoffs next year. I can give you six hundred of it. Every month. First of the month.”

He wrote it down as he talked, in block letters, the way men who fill out work orders write. Six hundred dollars a month, starting March first, until forty-three thousand was paid.

“That’s seventy-two months,” Grandma said. She didn’t even look at the paper. “Six years. I’ll be ninety-two.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I plan to be,” she said. “Write that I plan to be.”

A man at a table behind us laughed, one short surprised laugh, and then a couple of other people did too, and the room breathed a little.

Gil didn’t laugh. He wrote at the bottom of the menu, in smaller letters: Mrs. Duda plans to be 92. Then he signed his whole name under it, Gilbert S. Kowalczyk, and the date, and turned the menu around so she could read it.

She read every word, because she always does. Then she pushed it back across the bar to him.

“That’s a fine start,” she said. “But I have one more condition.”

“Name it.”

“I want a job.”

Gil blinked. So did I.

“Fridays,” Grandma said. “Five to nine. I’ll work the door and keep the waiting list. You pay me whatever you’d pay anybody, and I’ll watch the room.” She smiled again, sweet as pie. “I’d like to see where my money goes. I’d like to see it doing well.”

The old farmer at the corner of the bar slapped it and said, “Hire her, Gil, she’ll run this place better than you do,” and the whole bar laughed, a real laugh this time.

Gil looked at her for a long moment. Then something in his face gave way, and he laughed too, just a little, and wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist.

“Fifteen an hour and all the fish you can eat,” he said. “You start next Friday.”

“I don’t eat much fish,” Grandma said. “But I’ll take the fifteen.”