Every Friday at the Legion Fish Fry

Three Plates

Marcia stood there. Nobody moved. The meat raffle man called out a number somewhere behind us, and nobody at our table heard which one.

Then Marcia pulled out the chair across from Grandpa, beside Bud, and sat down. She set her purse in her lap.

She opened it and took out her wallet, and her hands were shaking so badly she dropped it on the table.

“I’m buying,” she said. Her voice cracked. “Tonight. I’m buying all three. Yours and Debbie’s and mine. Please, Dad. Let me buy.”

Grandpa looked at me. I don’t know what he saw on my face. I know I nodded, because I couldn’t have said anything.

Marcia went up to the line by herself. I watched her stand there in her church coat behind a family with four little boys.

She paid for three cod plates, thirty-six dollars, and a high school boy helped her carry them back.

She set a plate in front of her father, and one in front of me, and sat down. She did not eat. She stared at her own plate for a long time.

“Rick left when the girls were fourteen and twelve,” she said, to nobody in particular.

“You all know that. He left with the boat and the truck and half the savings, and I worked the bakery at the grocery store for nineteen years.”

“I know, honey,” Grandpa said.

“The girls had nothing for college. Nothing. Megan wanted to be a nurse.” She looked at me then, quickly, and away.

“And Ashley and Joe were paying rent on a trailer that leaked, with a baby coming.”

She took a breath. “I told myself it was mine anyway. My inheritance. Just early. I told myself Mom would have wanted the girls to have it. I told myself a lot of things.”

“And me?” I asked. It came out quiet. “What did you tell yourself about me?”

Marcia looked straight at me for the first time all night. Her eyes were wet, and her mascara was going, and she did not wipe it.

“That you wanted the house,” she said. “That you were over there three times a week because you were working on him. Because that’s what I was doing, Debbie. I thought everybody was doing what I was doing.”

Nobody at that table said anything for a long while.

Making It Right

“I don’t have ninety-six thousand dollars,” Marcia said finally. “I’m not going to pretend I do. But I can pay some back. Every month. I already called the bank about it.”

She looked at her father. “It’ll take me the rest of my life.”

“Then it takes the rest of your life,” Grandpa said. Not unkindly. Just plain. “That’s fair.”

“It is,” she said. “It’s fair.”

She turned to me. I could see what it cost her. My aunt Marcia, who had never in my whole life said she was wrong about a casserole, much less anything else.

“I’m sorry, Debbie,” she said. “I’m sorry I said that to him. I’m sorry I said it in front of you. I’m sorry for every Friday you paid when it should have been me.”

I had imagined that moment many times, driving home on Fridays with the radio off. In my imagination I always said something clever and cutting. I did not say any of it.

“Eat your fish, Aunt Marcia,” I said. “It’s getting cold.”

She laughed. It was a wet, broken laugh, but it was a laugh. She picked up her fork.

Across from me, Hank reached over and patted Marcia’s arm, twice, the way you’d pat a horse that’s been spooked.

Bud cleared his throat and said the cod was a little dry tonight, wasn’t it, and everybody agreed that it was.

Then Grandpa picked up the paper cup of tartar sauce off his own plate. He reached across the table and set it beside Marcia’s plate without a word.

She looked at it. She looked at him.

“You always ran out too,” he said. “When you were little. Your mother used to give you hers.”

Marcia put her hand over her mouth, and I put my arm around her shoulders, and the three old men at that table found something very interesting to look at on the far wall where the flags were.