The Booth Bench On Moms Porch

That night I went out and bought a card table and a wipe-clean cloth with cherries on it, and Mom called three people. Just three. Cindy, and Eldred and Irma, to ask if they would like to come out Friday for a fish fry on the porch.

“You’d be doing me a kindness,” she told Irma on the phone. I heard it from the kitchen. “I can’t seem to eat alone anymore.”

She had never said that out loud to anyone. She said it into a rotary-style phone with the cord stretched into the pantry, and I stood at the sink with the water running and let her think I had not heard.

Mom planned to fry perch for four.

She had it all laid out on Thursday, a pound and a half of fillets from the fish market in town, thawing in a Pyrex dish. Her good cast iron was out.

She had pulled Dad’s old bottle of Korbel from the top of the pantry, where it had sat since August of last year, and she stood there a minute with it in her hand before she put it on the counter.

“Four people,” she said. “Cindy, and Eldred and Irma, and you.”

But Irma Krieger told two women at church on Sunday. Those two women told their husbands, and the husbands told the Friday crowd at the Lamplighter bar, and on Thursday night my phone rang eleven times.

“Is it true Carol’s got the booth?”

“What time should we come?”

“Should I bring anything?”

“Is it all right if Hoot comes? He’s eighty-eight and he hasn’t been out of the house since the Fourth.”

I wrote the names on the back of an envelope. By midnight I had fourteen, and a cast iron skillet that fed four.

“We’ll have to let them bring their own,” Eldred said when I called him back. “I’ll tell them. We’ll all stop at the Lamplighter and get it to go.”

“Eldred,” I said. “That’s Derrick’s money.”

“It’s the only fish fry in forty miles, Ashley,” he said, and there was a smile in his voice. “A man’s got to eat. He just won’t be eating it in there.”

So that is how it happened. On Friday, October sixteenth, at about a quarter to five, cars began coming up the gravel.

The Hanson brothers came first, in a farm truck, each carrying a stack of plain white takeout boxes with a Lamplighter receipt stapled to each lid.

Then Eldred and Irma with a grocery bag of rye bread and paper cups of coleslaw. Then Lyle and Cindy, who had traded her Friday shift to the other girl, with the cod and the perch and a cardboard flat of Styrofoam clamshells stacked to her chin.

Hoot Koenig came in his daughter’s minivan, in a hat I swear he had worn to my parents’ wedding. They carried him up the porch steps like a king.

My mother, who had spent the whole day pretending she was not nervous, came out the front door with a cut glass relish tray in both hands.

She had made it herself. Carrots and celery sticks standing up in ice water. Radishes cut like roses. Pickled beets. Dill pickle spears. A crock of sharp cheddar spread and a sleeve of saltines. Exactly what the Lamplighter used to bring to the table, before Derrick replaced it with a tasting board.