Every Friday at the Legion Fish Fry

The Quiet Weeks

After that morning, something went out of Grandpa. I can’t say it any plainer. He stopped doing the crossword.

He stopped going out to the mailbox himself. He sat in his recliner with the television on and did not watch it.

Kim, the home care girl, called me on a Thursday. “He didn’t want lunch,” she said.

“He said he wasn’t hungry. Debbie, he always eats lunch. He told me his own daughter thinks he’s a fool.”

That was not what Marcia had said. But I understood why it landed that way.

She had told him the granddaughter who sets up his pills is a gold digger, and she had told him in a voice that said he was too old to see it.

I drove over after work. Grandpa was in the recliner.

I sat on the arm of the couch, the way I used to sit when I was ten, and asked him what he would eat if he could eat anything.

He thought about it a long time. “Fish fry,” he said.

“At the Legion. Your grandma and I went every Friday for forty-some years. Cod for her, perch for me when they had it. I haven’t been since she passed.”

“Why not?”

“Marcia said it was too much fuss,” he said. “Getting me in and out of the car. The parking. The crowd. She said I’d fall.”

He shrugged one shoulder. “Maybe she was right. I don’t know.”

“Grandpa,” I said, “tomorrow’s Friday.”