The Fish Fry in Dad’s Driveway

I stood at the fryer with a dripping basket in my fist, watching my father hold a hand he could not find the words for, and I had to turn around.

Behind me the oil hissed and the voices rose and fell. A woman asked whether there was more tartar sauce. Somebody laughed. I stared at the fish going gold in the pot and blinked until I could see again.

When I looked back, Dad was sitting at the end of a table with Ferris on one side, Elroy Schroeder across from him, and a retired lineman named Arlo Ebert beside them, and he was laughing.

Really laughing, with his head tipped back and his whole face come open. It was the laugh I had not heard since Mom’s funeral, the one that starts in his chest and takes a while to arrive.

Elroy had said something, I never learned what, and Ferris was shaking his head at it, and Dad was wiping his eyes again, only this time for a different reason.

I thought: there he is. I thought: I would have paid a thousand dollars for that.

We ran out of cod at a quarter after six. By then I had made a hundred and ten plates, and Duane’s shirt was soaked through, and my arms ached to the shoulders.

The light had gone long and low across the stubble, and the last cars were pulling out one at a time with their headlights on.

The men stacked the chairs without being asked, and Marv’s firemen carried the tables back out to the truck. The boy with the spray bottle stood beside me and said, “Ma’am, is there any more applesauce?”

I gave him the last jar, which I had been saving, and he looked at me as if I had handed him a trophy.

Elroy Schroeder was the last to leave. He paused at the end of the driveway with his wife already in the Buick and called back to Dad, “Same time next Friday, Frank?”

“I suppose I could be talked into it.”

“Good,” said Elroy. “I’ll bring eight more fellas and a bigger casserole.” He drove away, and Dad stood at the end of the driveway watching the Buick go, with his cap in his hand.

Duane took the fryers apart while I washed the baskets in the laundry tub in the garage. I could hear Dad out front talking with Marv, their voices low.

When I finally came out, my father was sitting on the garage step with a cup of coffee in Mom’s old mug, the one with the cardinal on it, looking at nothing in particular. I sat beside him.

The concrete was still warm from the day.

“You didn’t promise me,” he said.

“No.”

“I knew when you didn’t.” He sipped, and set the mug between his shoes. “I should have let it go years ago. The peg. He’s been moving that peg since 1994, a hole or two at a time. Your mother watched him do it and told me to leave it alone.”

“Then why say it now?”

“I think I was tired.” He turned his cap in his hands.