The Fish Fry in Dad’s Driveway

By three-thirty we had gone through every lawn chair in the garage. By four, Duane was on the second fryer, still in his work shirt from the plant, sweating through it and grinning like a boy.

Marv’s wife Judy had taken over the potato pancakes in Dad’s kitchen.

Two of the neighbor ladies arrived with pans of bars, and a boy of about twelve, somebody’s grandson, appeared with a bucket and a spray bottle and began wiping down tables without being asked.

I kept counting heads, because I could not help it. I am a person who counts things. By four o’clock I had counted sixty-one veterans, not including their wives or the ones who came for the food and not the history.

They were Korea men and Vietnam men, a few Guard fellows from the nineties, and a couple who had spent their years in uniform fixing trucks in Germany.

They sat shoulder to shoulder at the folding tables in jackets and ball caps, passing the coleslaw and the tartar sauce, and they were loud in the good way, the way men get when they have been looking forward to a thing and nobody has spoiled it.

Nobody asked where Roger was. Nobody had to. Jeff, one of Marv’s firemen, had driven past the Legion on his way back from the hardware store, and he reported to Marv in a low voice, not low enough: “Eleven cars in the lot. On a Friday.”

Dad walked among the tables with a paper plate in his hand that he forgot to eat from. He stopped at every one.

He shook a hand here and clapped a shoulder there, and I saw him bend to say something to a man in a wheelchair, then straighten and wipe his eye with the back of his wrist like he had gotten smoke in it.

At about ten past four, I saw the walker.

It came up the driveway one slow bump at a time, silver, with tennis balls on the back feet, and behind it came the oldest man I had seen all day. Ferris Nowak is ninety-one.

He served in Korea at the end of the war, in 1953, and he has not driven since his stroke, and his granddaughter had let him out at the end of the road because the shoulder was too full for her to pull in.

It took him nearly four minutes to cross that driveway. Not one man at any table stood to help him, because they all knew better. Ferris Nowak does not like help.

He stopped in front of my father and had to tip his whole head back to look up. “Frank.”

“Ferris.”

“I haven’t sat down to a Friday supper alone since Myrna passed. That was four years ago in August.” His voice was dry as paper. “I do not intend to start tonight.”

Dad opened his mouth, and nothing came out.

Ferris reached into his jacket and took out a five-dollar bill folded in quarters, soft from his pocket. He held it up. “For the fish.”

Dad did not take the bill. He took the old man’s hand instead, the one with the five in it, and held it in both of his, and did not let go.