The Booth Bench On Moms Porch

She set it on the card table and looked at the porch full of people.

“Well,” she said. “Sit down. It’s going to get cold.”

And they sat. Fourteen of them on the rockers and kitchen chairs and the porch swing and on overturned buckets and the top step. Hoot got the middle of the bench, with Mom on his left, and the right-hand end stayed empty, because nobody had to be told.

I made old fashioneds in the kitchen. Brandy, sweet, the way it is always done, with a muddled cherry and an orange slice and a splash of seven-up, in whatever glass we had. Mason jars, mostly. I was a little drunk on the smell of the orange alone.

Somebody said grace. It was Eldred, and he is not a man of many words, and he said only, “Lord, thank you for this fish and this bench, and thank you for Elwin.” That is all. I had to go back in the kitchen for a minute.

At one point Irma said, “This is the best fish fry I’ve had in years,” and Cindy, who had picked up those same boxes at the Lamplighter window an hour before, said, “It’s the same fish.”

“It is not,” said Irma. “It’s warmer.”

The sun went down behind the section road, orange and enormous, and a few of them laughed, and my mother laughed with them. I want you to know that. I had not heard her laugh in fourteen months, not a real one, and she did it with her head back, so that I could see the whole row of her good teeth.

When everybody left, at eight, Mom did not want to go in. She sat on the bench in the dark with her blanket on her knees, looking at the empty seat next to her.

“He’d have eaten the whole perch,” she said. “And he’d have said it was too dry.”

“He’d have eaten yours too.”

“He did, every Friday for forty years.” She smiled. “I used to hate it.”

That was the first Friday.

The second Friday, October twenty-third, thirty-one people came.

I counted. I stood at the corner of the porch with a clipboard like a church usher, and I counted heads, because Mom had run out of mason jars by five-fifteen and I did not want to run out of cherries.

And everyone, every single person, carried a white box with a receipt stapled to the lid.

Cindy found me by the porch rail at six, in her good cardigan, eating a potato pancake off her palm.

“I need to tell you something,” she said. She had her fierce, flat, thirty-one-years-on-the-floor face.

“Is it Derrick?”

“He’s counting,” Cindy said. “He doesn’t say anything. But Adam saw a tally on the back of the host stand.”

She held up a finger. “Two weeks ago, Friday dining room, a hundred and forty-two covers.”

A second finger. “Last Friday, ninety. Tonight, I’d say sixty. Takeout, though, he’s up. He’s selling more fish than he ever did. He’s just not selling any old fashioneds, or pie, or the second round, or the ice cream drinks, because people are leaving them at home to eat on your porch.”

“That was never what I wanted,” I said, and I meant it. I had not wanted to hurt him. I wanted my mother to have a place to sit.