The Fish Fry in Dad’s Driveway

“Went white as a plate. Then red. Then he stood up and told the whole room I’d shamed him in front of the post, and that a man who’d do that was not welcome at the fish fry, and maybe not at the post at all.”

I heard what Dad did not say, which was that eight men had watched a seventy-two-year-old man get told the truth about his own hand.

My uncle Roger is five years younger than Dad. As boys they shared a bedroom on the home place out past the creamery road, two iron beds and one window.

Roger was the one who followed Dad to the bus and cried when Dad went into the Army in 1969.

Dad did a year in Vietnam and came home quiet, and Roger, who was fifteen then, was the only person in the family who could get him to talk about it, a little at a time, mostly by sitting next to him on the porch and saying nothing at all.

Roger has run the kitchen at Post 318 for eleven years, and he is proud of it.

He orders the cod, he sets the schedule for the volunteers, and he stands at the pass-through in a white apron every Friday night calling out orders like a man conducting an orchestra.

So I understood, even then, that this was never really about twenty and twenty-four.

I understood something else, too, sitting in Dad’s kitchen. I could have picked up the telephone that night and called the post commander, a man named Clifford Reuter who has known our family forever and would have set the whole thing right in one conversation. I said so.

“No,” Dad said.

“Dad, he can’t just ban you. You’ve paid your dues for forty-some years.”

“I said no, Jill.” He said it gently, which is how I knew he meant it. “A post that has to be told to be decent isn’t worth the telling.

If Clifford has to order my brother to let me in, then I’m in on a leash. I would rather eat at home.” He reached across and laid his hand over mine, thick through the palm and spotted on the back.

“Promise me you’ll leave it alone.”

I did not promise. I looked at my father and let him believe I had. That is a thing I am not proud of, and I will say now that I would do it again.

I slept badly that night. Around two in the morning, lying next to my husband Duane, who sleeps like a cord of wood, I started thinking about the driveway.

Dad’s driveway is long, a concrete apron in front of a two-car garage, wide enough to park six trucks. It sits at the end of a gravel road with a field of corn stubble on one side and the neighbors’ tidy lawn on the other.

My parents paved it the summer I turned twelve. Dad used to say the best thing about a long driveway was that nobody could ever say you didn’t have room for company.

Friday was less than two days off, and the clock was already running. I am a dental hygienist, and the biggest thing I had ever fried was a pan of chicken for the church picnic, which went badly.