Every Friday at the Legion Fish Fry

Every Friday

So that became our Friday. I got off at the clinic at four thirty, went home and let the dog out, and pulled into Grandpa’s driveway at five sharp.

By the third week, he was waiting at the door with his cap already on.

Tom came along some Fridays when the shop let him go on time. He’d sit beside Bud and argue about diesel trucks.

Other Fridays he worked late, because a dealer service department does not care that it is Lent.

Every Friday at the register, Grandpa got out his wallet. Every Friday, I put my hand over his and said, “My treat.”

Every Friday, he put the twenty away and patted his pocket twice. It was our little ceremony.

Tom asked me once if it bothered me, spending the money. Twenty-four dollars a week, more with a drink.

I told him it was the best twenty-four dollars I spent all week, and I meant it.

The third Friday, something happened that I still can’t tell about without my voice going.

We sat down at our spot. I went back to the line for napkins. When I came back, there was a little paper cup of tartar sauce sitting beside my plate.

A second one. Grandpa was busy with his rye bread and did not look up.

“Where’d this come from?” I asked.

“Don’t know,” he said. “Must have been on the table.”

But the corner of his mouth gave him away, and Bud, across from us, was grinning into his coleslaw like a boy who knows a secret.

The next week it happened again. And the week after.

Somewhere between the line and the table, my grandfather, ninety-one years old, with a cane in one hand and a plate in the other, was asking the girl at the window for an extra tartar sauce.

He never once said a word about it. He just set it beside my plate, every Friday, because he had seen me run out one time in January and decided it was not going to happen to me again.

I am a grown woman with grown children. I have held the hands of dying people at the clinic and not cried in front of them.

I sat at a folding table in the Legion hall over a paper cup of tartar sauce and had to go to the ladies’ room.

The Corner Seat

By the first week of March, people knew us. The girls at the register waved. The man who ran the meat raffle called Grandpa by name.

Little kids came by to look at the old men the way kids look at the old men at every fish fry in Wisconsin.

Then Grandpa started doing something new. When we pulled up, he’d tell me to drop him at the door.

“Park the car, Debbie,” he’d say. “Take your time.” And he’d go in ahead of me with his cane.

By the time I got inside, he’d be sitting at the end of our table, and the chair in the corner beside him, against the paneling, would have his brown leather glove laid across the seat.

“That’s taken,” Hank told a man one Friday who tried to sit there. “That’s Walt’s girl’s seat.”

I heard it from the doorway. I stood there holding my purse and my car keys and did not move for a second, because nobody had called me Walt’s girl since I was in pigtails.

Grandpa moved his glove when I came up, and I sat down, and the man who had tried to sit there apologized to me like he had walked into a church in muddy boots.