The Fish Fry in Dad’s Driveway

“Don’t be.” She looked up the driveway at the long folding tables, the lawn chairs, the old men in ball caps passing a bowl of rye bread, my father at the end of it with Ferris Nowak at his shoulder. “This is what he’d have wanted for Frank, if he had been able to want it.”

Then she took a paper plate off the stack, and I put two pieces of fish on it, and she carried it down the driveway to the end of my father’s table. She sat down across from him, and she did not say a word about her husband.

Dad looked at her. Then he pushed the tartar sauce across the table, the way you do with a guest, and he said, “Joni.”

“Frank.”

“The slaw’s good.”

“It’s the same slaw,” she said.

“I know it is.” He picked up a piece of cod, and I turned back to the fryer, because that was not mine to watch.

We took everything apart by seven. Duane coiled the extension cords, and Marv’s firemen carried the tables out to the truck, and somebody’s grandson swept the concrete with a push broom twice as tall as he was. The last cars went out with their headlights on, one at a time.

Nobody mentioned the white Ford. Nobody had to. Everyone who drove past our mailbox that night looked at the empty end of the shoulder and kept going.

I did not feel anything small and mean about it. I had felt it the first Friday and had not liked myself afterward.

This time what I felt was nearer to sorrow. I had a good father and a good driveway and a hundred and thirty people, and somewhere on County K a seventy-two-year-old man was sitting at a kitchen table in the quiet with a dog and a deck of cards.

I did not forgive him that night. I did not hate him either. I let that be the size it was.

When the tables were gone and the garage light was on, I found Dad out there alone, standing by the wall where the turkey burner hangs, with his hands in the pockets of the tan jacket.

I had Ferris Nowak’s five-dollar bill in my fleece pocket. I had found it the first Friday, folded in quarters and tucked under the salt shaker on the end table, where he must have slipped it after Dad took his hand instead. I had carried it for two weeks, not knowing what to do with it.

I held it out. Dad looked at it for a time without taking it.

“Put it somewhere it’ll stay,” I said.

He took it out of my hand and unfolded it, once, twice, until it lay flat and soft as cloth in his palm. Then he went to the workbench and found a thumbtack in the coffee can where Mom kept her screws, and he pressed it through the middle of Ferris’s five and pinned it to the wall stud above the nail.

He stood back with his hands in his pockets. The cap sat a little crooked. He looked at it the way he used to look at the milk truck on the last day he drove it.

I hung the fryer basket on its hook beneath the bill, and I turned off the light.