The Fish Fry in Dad’s Driveway

I took the day off from the dental office. By one o’clock Marv’s truck was in the driveway and he and two of his firemen were unloading tables. Dad heard the engine and came to the screen door, and he stood there looking out for a long time.

“What’s this?” he asked at last.

“A fish fry.”

“Jilly.”

“It’s Friday, Dad.”

He opened his mouth to argue, and I watched him decide not to.

He stood in his stocking feet, a white-haired man watching four tables go up end to end, and he looked like somebody who had walked into the wrong house and was only just beginning to find it familiar. “Nobody’s going to come,” he said finally.

“Then we eat a lot of fish.”

“Don’t you get cute with me.”

“Put your shoes on, Dad.”

He did.

He came out in the tan canvas jacket he has worn since the nineties and the plain dark green cap he wears for yard work, and he walked the whole setup once with his hands in his pockets, looking over the fryers and the propane tanks and the tubs of batter I had mixed in Mom’s big enamel bowl.

He did not say it was a good idea. But he checked the hose connection on the second tank, and he moved the cord Duane had run so nobody would trip, and I saw his shoulders come down an inch.

By two the oil was at three hundred and fifty degrees. I stood over the first fryer with a basket in my hand and a thermometer clipped to the pot, wearing my navy fleece because the wind came across the field and found every gap.

“You’ll want to dry the fish first,” Dad said behind me. “A wet fish spits.”

“I know, Dad.”

“Just saying.”

I smiled at the fryer so he wouldn’t see.

At ten minutes to three, a car turned in off the county road.

I want to describe it right, because I will never forget it.

It was a gray Buick with an old man at the wheel and his wife beside him with a casserole dish on her lap, and it came up the drive slowly, the way you drive when you are not sure you are in the right place.

It stopped beside the garage. The old man got out and stood with his hand on the roof of the car, looking at the tables and the fryers and my father.

He was Elroy Schroeder, eighty years old, a Navy man and a regular at the Legion for fifty years.

“Frank,” he said. “I heard there was fish.”

Dad stood very still. “You heard right,” he said, and his voice cracked in the middle, just slightly.

Elroy nodded once. He came around and opened the door for his wife, and they walked to the first table with the casserole between them, a green bean thing with the crispy onions on top.

Then a pickup came, and another. Then a van from the senior ride service with six men in it, and two brothers on one motorcycle, which I will not pretend to understand.

Then a line of cars along the shoulder of the gravel road, all the way down to the mailbox. I lowered the first basket into the oil and it hissed up at me like applause.