The Fish Fry I Held on the Road

A Plate for Royce

Here is where I could have won it.

I could have told him to get back in his truck. I had forty witnesses and the high ground and a boy with red ears from the night before, and every one of those neighbors would have backed me, and Royce knew it, standing there small on my road in the dark. Brenda next door would have cheered me for it. Half of me wanted to.

But I thought about what Eli would remember. He was going to remember this night his whole life, one way or the other, and I did not want the thing he kept to be the night his dad sent his grandpa away. I wanted him to keep the fish.

So I said, “You hungry? There is plenty.”

Royce did not answer right away. He looked at the fire, and at the plates, and at the crate where his grandson was working.

“I could eat,” he said at last. We walked up the lane together, not talking, and the crowd watched us come, and I will give them this, not one of them said a word or looked at Royce sideways, because that is how people on a gravel road are when a man comes to eat crow and does it quiet.

I did not hand Royce a plate. I let Eli do it.

“Grandpa wants a plate, bud,” I said.

And my boy, who had been told the night before that there was no plate for him, stood up on his milk crate and laid two fillets on a paper plate with his careful hands, and held it down to his grandfather, and said, “Careful, it is hot.”

Royce took the plate from the boy. His hand was not steady. He said, “Thank you.” And then, because the man could not help himself, could not go a whole minute without being Royce, he added, quiet, just to Eli, “You did good work tonight.”

Eli lit up like the sign behind him. “I did not spill one,” he said.

“I heard that,” Royce said.

“Not even one,” Eli said again, because he needed his grandfather to be sure of it.

“I believe you,” Royce said.

And he did. You could see it cost him something to say, and you could see he meant it.

He ate standing up at the edge of the crowd, by himself at first, and then old Cliff went over and stood with him, because Cliff is a Christian man and that is what they do, and after a while Royce was talking low with Cliff about the walleye bite on the chain, and that was as close to mending as that night was going to get. It was enough. It was more than I had expected when I staked that sign.