The Fish Fry in Dad’s Driveway

“I think I was tired of watching a man I love lie about a little thing, when the little thing was the only way I had left to tell him I could see him.

And now he’s embarrassed, and I’ve made it worse by being right.”

“You weren’t wrong to tell the truth, Dad.”

“No.” He smiled, small and tired. “But I wasn’t kind about the timing, was I? Eight men watching.” He looked out at the dark field for a while. “He’s still my brother, Jilly. Whatever else he is. He is still my brother.”

I thawed another fifty pounds of cod that week, and I did not ask Dad, and he did not ask me. A town of eleven hundred does not keep a secret.

By Monday the story of the driveway had made the rounds of the hardware store, the Kwik Trip, and the beauty shop.

By Tuesday a woman from the Lutheran church had called asking if she could send a pan of scalloped potatoes, and a man from the feed mill wanted to know if he could bring a tent, because he owned one.

By Wednesday I had stopped being surprised.

I heard, secondhand, how the Legion looked that first Friday. The hall seats a hundred and fifty, and perhaps thirty people had come, most staying only long enough to eat and go. The walk-in cooler was full of cod nobody ordered.

Roger had stood at the pass-through in his white apron with his ladle in his hand, calling out orders to a room that mostly was not there.

I would like to tell you I felt nothing. I do not lie in my own account, and the truth is that when I first heard it I felt something small and mean and satisfied. I carried that feeling around for about a day.

Then I stood in Mom’s kitchen in front of her little cardinal and thought: Roger put my father out of a room he loved for being right about a card hand, and my father still calls him his brother.

So I put the small mean feeling down. I did not exactly forgive. But I stopped holding it.

That second Friday I was less nervous and a lot more tired. The cars started coming at two-thirty. I had sixty pounds of cod this time, and Duane had borrowed a third burner from a man at the plant.

Marv had left the tables up, chairs and all, folded against the garage wall. There were fifty-three men that day instead of sixty-one, and a few new faces, and Ferris Nowak had come early, with his granddaughter, who stayed.

Dad sat in a lawn chair with a plate on his knee. He looked less like a man being rescued and more like a man hosting. He had put on a clean shirt under the tan jacket.

At about ten past three, a pickup turned in off County K, and I looked for a white Ford and did not find one.

It was a dark green Silverado with a Legion decal in the back window. Two more trucks pulled in behind it and parked nose to tail along the gravel shoulder, behind the line of cars that was already halfway to the mailbox.