The Bait Shop That Opened at Four

The Friday Fish Fry

The Still Fork Lions Club hall is a cinder-block building behind the Methodist church with a flag out front and a kitchen that has been frying walleye on Friday nights since before I was married. On a good night it seats about a hundred and forty.

That Friday, October 23, it was full. Verna Haskell, the Lions president, was taking tickets at the door with a cash box and a pencil behind her ear. Pastor Dahl from the Lutheran church was working the coleslaw line.

Mr. Hasselquist sat at the end of a long table, a plate of fish in front of him and a puzzled look on his face. Roscoe sat beside him with the chairs he had brought, in case anyone needed one.

And at table three, in the folding chair he always takes, because it is near the door, sat my cousin Lowell Kregel. He is seventy-nine now. He leans on a cane, and he has not looked me in the eye in forty years.

Neither of us ever said why. We did not have to. He was the cousin who went out in the weather. I was the cousin who built a lesson out of him and then used it on my own boy.

When the plates were mostly cleared, I stood up.

I am not a man who speaks in public. I had a piece of paper in my coat pocket with some words on it, and when I tried to read it my hands shook so badly I put it away.

“Friends,” I said. The room went quiet. It is a small town. They knew something was coming.

“Most of you know that my son Trevonne and I have not been right with each other in fourteen years. You do not know why. I want to tell you, because it is mine to tell, and I have let you wonder long enough.”

I told them about the back room and the green folder. I told them what I said, word for word. I told them about the funeral lunch and the check, and I looked at Verna Haskell and at Pastor Dahl and at Roscoe, because those were the faces that had been in that basement.

I said it was wrong. I said what it cost: my son, my wife’s last peace, a grandson I have not spoken ten words to since he was seven. I did not give them a reason. I had one, and I knew better by then than to hand it to anybody as an excuse.

Then I turned to table three.

“Lowell. I have to tell you something I should have said in 1983.”

He did not look up.

“You made a mistake with a life jacket and a forecast, and two men paid for it, and you have carried that every day of your life. I carried it too.

“But I took the wrong lesson from it.

“I took it as proof that a man who dreams drowns everybody around him. It was never that. It was a worn-out life jacket and a payment due, and a man who needed to be told he could say no to a customer. You were not a warning, Lowell. You were my cousin. I used you, and I never once asked how you were.”

My cousin Lowell lifted his head.

I have seen that man’s face grim and I have seen it blank. I had never seen it do what it did then. He sat down hard on a folding chair, and nobody in the hall moved at all.