The Fish Fry in Dad’s Driveway

Dad was reading the same page of the newspaper for the second time when I came into his kitchen that Wednesday evening. I could tell because it was the page with the obituaries, and he never reads the obituaries twice.

“Roger told me not to come back,” he said, without looking up. “Not Friday, not ever. Said he’d rather I found somewhere else to eat.” He folded the paper in half and then in half again, the way he does when he is keeping his hands from doing something worse.

I put my purse on the counter. I had only come to drop off his pills, the ones in the plastic box with the days of the week on the lid, and I had not planned on staying. “Roger said that to you? Your Roger?”

“My Roger. Over cribbage, Jilly. Over a card game.”

My father is Frank Kuhn, seventy-seven years old, and he has eaten fish at the American Legion hall on Friday nights for thirty years.

He drove a milk truck for the creamery for most of that time, and when he stopped driving, the fish fry became the one fixed point in his week. Mom went with him until she got sick.

After she passed, six years ago in March, he kept going alone and sat at the same long table by the kitchen pass-through with the same four or five men.

Thirty years. He had not missed one for a bad knee, or a bad cold, or the ice storm that took down the lines along County K and left half the township dark.

The Legion keeps a generator for exactly that reason, and Dad liked to say he had eaten a perfectly good cod dinner by lantern light in 2008.

I sat down across from him. The kitchen smelled of the coffee he makes too strong and drinks too late. On the windowsill above the sink stood the little ceramic cardinal Mom bought at a craft sale in 1998, wearing a coat of dust now that would have bothered her terribly.

“Tell me what happened,” I said.

He took his time. My father is not a man who tells a story fast, and he never learned to tell one that makes him look good. “We were playing in the back room Tuesday night after the post meeting, the usual game.

Elroy Schroeder, a couple of the Lutheran fellas, me. Eight of us, counting the ones standing around watching. Roger laid down a hand and counted it twenty-four, and pegged it right there on the board.”

“Okay.”

“It was a twenty, Jilly. I counted it in my head before he’d even finished laying it down.” Dad turned his coffee cup a quarter turn on the table.

“I should have let him have it. I know that. But he’s been doing it for years, a hole or two here and there, and the men let it go because he’s the one who runs the kitchen and nobody wants to be the one.

That night I was just tired of it. I said, ‘Roger, that’s a twenty.’ Not mean. Just said it, out loud.”

“What did he do?”