Every Friday at the Legion Fish Fry

The First Friday

I got there at five o’clock with my coat on and the car running. Grandpa was in his chair.

He had not gotten ready because he had not believed me, and I could see on his face that he was embarrassed about that.

“Get your cap, Grandpa,” I said. “And your cardigan. It’s cold in that hall by the door.”

He looked at me a long moment. Then he stood up, slower than he used to, and went down the hall, and came back in his tan cardigan over his plaid shirt and his navy cap pulled down square on his head.

The Legion hall in our town is a long, low building with wood paneling on every wall and flags along the back, the American flag and the flag of every branch of the service, and pictures of every post commander since 1946.

On a Friday night in Lent it is so crowded you cannot hear yourself think.

There are folding tables in long rows, people elbow to elbow, kids running between the rows, and a line out the door for the cod.

The plates are twelve dollars for the cod and fourteen for the perch.

They come with coleslaw, rye bread, a little paper cup of tartar sauce, and your choice of fries or potato pancakes. Grandpa always took the pancakes.

At the register, Grandpa got out his wallet. It was the same brown wallet he had carried since I was in high school, worn white at the fold.

He pulled out a twenty and held it toward the girl.

I put my hand over his. “My treat,” I said, and I paid for both of us with my own card before he could argue.

He looked at me. I knew what he was thinking. I was thinking it too. Marcia had said I only came around for his money.

Well, here was where his money stopped. Not one dime of his supper would ever come out of that wallet on a Friday.

I did not say any of that to him. I didn’t have to.

He put the twenty back in the wallet, and the wallet back in his pocket, and he patted the pocket twice, and that was all.

Bud and Hank

We found two seats at the end of a long table near the wall.

Across from us sat two men I half knew from church and the post office, both of them old enough to be my grandfather too.

“Walt Lindquist,” the first one said, and set down his fork. “I’ll be. I thought you died.” That was Bud.

He was eighty-eight, Army like Grandpa, and he had spent his hitch in Germany in the late fifties.

“Not yet,” Grandpa said. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

The other one was Hank. He was eighty-four and had been Navy, on a destroyer off Vietnam, and he laughed so hard at that he had to take a drink of water. “Sit down, Walt. Sit down before you fall down.”

I slid Grandpa’s plate in front of him and tucked a napkin by his hand. He was smiling at me.

I did not know how long it had been since I had seen him smile like that, all the way up into his big glasses.

The three of them talked like I was not there, which was fine with me.

They talked about the creamery and the feed mill and the year the river came over the bridge. They talked about who had died. They talked about who should have.

Hank wanted to know if Grandpa still had the old Chevy pickup.

Grandpa said he sold it to a kid from Durand in 2019 and was still mad about the price. Bud said everybody gets robbed on a truck once in his life.

Grandpa went quiet for a second at that. Then he laughed and said, “Some of us more than once,” and picked up his fork again.

I ate my cod and listened. I ran out of tartar sauce halfway through my fish the way I always do, because I put it on everything, even the potato pancakes. Grandpa noticed. He did not say anything.

When we left, Bud shook Grandpa’s hand across the table and held on to it. “Next Friday?” he said.

Grandpa looked at me. I nodded.

“Next Friday,” Grandpa said.