The Fish Fry in Dad’s Driveway

Clifford Reuter climbed out of the first one. He is sixty-eight, a retired rural mail carrier with a gray crew cut and a voice made for reading minutes, and he had on the good Legion cap with all the pins, which he does not wear to the grocery store.

The driveway noticed. I stood at the fryer with my basket dripping and watched Dad start to push himself up out of his lawn chair. Elroy Schroeder put one hand flat on his arm, and Dad sat back down.

Clifford did not walk to my father. I want that on the record. He walked to the middle of the tables, took off the cap, and held it against his belt like a man at a graveside.

“Jill,” he said, “I know Frank’s rule, and I’m not here to carry anybody anywhere. I came to eat fish. But the post met Monday night, and the post asked me to give you its report. If Frank will allow it.”

Dad looked at him for a long moment. “It’s a free driveway, Clifford.”

Clifford stepped up onto the concrete stoop by the garage door so the back tables could hear. He is not a tall man. He did not need to be.

“Ninety-four members came Monday,” he said. “We haven’t seen that many in the hall since the flood benefit in 2011. I’ll give you the numbers, because that’s what the post voted to put in the minutes.

“Last Friday we sold thirty-one dinners at Post 318. We threw out a walk-in cooler of cod that cost us nine hundred and twelve dollars. The same night, a hundred and ten plates went out of this driveway, on a borrowed fryer and a turkey burner.”

Nobody said a word. Somewhere behind me the oil popped.

“The vote was sixty-one to nine,” Clifford said. “The kitchen chairmanship is taken away from the man who has held it for eleven years, effective Monday.

“A committee of four orders the fish and sets the schedule from now on, and Marv Kessler chairs it. The nine hundred and twelve dollars comes out of the kitchen fund. He is welcome to cook when the committee asks him, and not before.”

He said it plainly, in the same voice he uses for the minutes. He did not say Roger’s name. Nobody needed him to.

“Frank Kuhn didn’t ask for any of it,” Clifford said. “Let that be in the record too.”

Dad had his hands folded on his knee. He looked at the concrete between his shoes, and I saw his jaw working, and I could not tell whether he was angry or grateful or only tired. I think it was all three.

Then Clifford turned toward me. He took a white envelope out of his shirt pocket, the kind with the Legion’s return address printed in the corner, and he held it out across the table.

“Four hundred dollars,” he said. “Three-forty for the cod, sixty for the oil, propane and flour. Arlo checked the math twice.”

Arlo Ebert, who is the post’s finance officer as well as a retired lineman, raised two fingers from a lawn chair without getting up.

“I can’t take that,” I said. “I didn’t do it for the post.”

“I know you didn’t,” said Clifford. “That’s the only reason it’s yours.”