The Fish Fry in Dad’s Driveway

I stood there with a pair of tongs in one hand and an envelope in the other and no way to put either down. My face went hot, and I did not know where to look.

“Take it, Jilly,” Dad said, from his chair. His voice was rough. “You’ll want it for next Friday’s cod.”

Somebody laughed, and then somebody else did, and the whole driveway let out its breath.

The boy with the spray bottle, who had been standing by the napkin table all afternoon, raised his hand like he was in school. “Does that mean the applesauce is free now?”

“The applesauce was always free, son,” said Marv, and the laughing turned into something louder. Clifford put his cap back on, took a plate from Judy, and sat down between a Korea man and a Guard fellow as if he had been coming all along.

No one clapped. That would have been wrong, and the whole driveway knew it. What they did instead was eat, and I think it was the best thing anybody could have done.

The line of cars reached the mailbox again by four. I counted a hundred and thirty plates before I gave up counting, and I ran out of cod at ten past six, with a fresh pan of potato pancakes still warm in Dad’s kitchen.

It was after five when I saw my aunt Joni.

She had parked at the very end of the gravel shoulder, past everyone, and she came up the driveway on foot with a white plastic tub held in front of her in both hands. She is sixty-eight, small and plain, and she wore the navy church coat she wears to funerals.

I knew what was in the tub. She makes her coleslaw with celery seed and a little sugar, and she makes it only for funerals and the Fourth of July.

She did not go to Dad. She came to the fryer, where I was standing, and set the tub on the end of the table beside the tartar sauce. Then she stood there with her hands folded and watched the basket sink into the oil.

“He’s home,” she said, so quietly I almost lost it under the hiss. “He was at the kitchen table when Clifford called with the vote. He hasn’t said a word since Monday, not to me and not to the dog.”

“Aunt Joni, I’m not going to say anything to him.”

“I’m not asking you to.” She watched the oil. “I wanted you to know that he’s not a hard man. He just never learned to be seen losing.”

I did not answer. I lifted the basket and shook it out over the pot.

“Thirty years of two extra pegs on a cribbage board,” Joni said. “It was the only place in the whole world he ever got to be ahead of Frank.”

I turned off the burner under the basket and looked at her. She was sixty-eight years old and she was holding on to her own elbows.

“I don’t know what he’ll do,” she said. “I came because I didn’t want to hear it secondhand. This was a lot of people to be wrong in front of.”

“I’m sorry, Aunt Joni.”