The Booth Bench On Moms Porch

“I know it.” Cindy wiped her fingers on a napkin. “It’s just the way of it. Honey, you can’t sell people the same fish and make them forget what fish tastes like on a Friday with their friends.”

She looked out over the porch, at thirty-one people eating with their coats on.

“And there’s another thing.” She lowered her voice. “He told me Tuesday that one of the tour companies cancelled. He had four more buses booked for fall color, and one of them canceled. The woman said she’d heard the Lamplighter wasn’t the same.”

“Wasn’t the same how?”

“She said the whole reason her group loved it was the regulars,” Cindy said. “The old people in the booths. They said it was the most real thing they had seen in Wisconsin. They came for the old people, Ashley. And he sent them out the door for the buses.”

The third Friday was October thirtieth.

Forty-three people came. I did not count. Cindy did.

It was a clear, cold afternoon, thirty-eight degrees, with a thin white sun low in the south and the last of the leaves letting go of the maples all at once. Mom wore her good church coat. I had told her it was too fancy for a porch, and she said, “It is a Friday, Ashley.”

At ten after five, a black pickup turned off County Road K and came up the gravel, slowly, the way you drive when you are not sure you are wanted.

I knew whose truck it was. Everybody did. Forty-three people went quiet one by one, the way a field goes quiet when a hawk crosses it, and a plastic fork dropped somewhere and rolled across the boards.

Then he got out.

He was not wearing the quarter-zip. He had on a plain brown work jacket I had never seen before, and there was flour on one sleeve. In his hands, held out in front of him the way a boy carries a cake, he had a big foil pan, still steaming at the corners.

Under his arm, wrapped in a white bar towel, was something flat.

I am not proud of that, and I am not sorry. I had done my one thing, and I was not going to do his.

At the foot of the steps he stopped. He looked at Eldred, and at Cindy, and at the rows of faces of people who had eaten in his building for thirty years. His ears were bright red.

Then he looked at my mother, and for the first time since I had known him, Derrick Jorgensen did not look like a man managing a customer.

“Mrs. Hale,” he said. “Carol.”

Mom sat with her hands folded. She had a paper cup of coffee on her knee, and she did not put it down.

“Derrick,” she said.

“I fried this myself.” His voice cracked on it. “Perch. Lars’s recipe, the beer batter. It’s not takeout. I stood at the fryer for an hour. It’s not as good as Adam’s. But it’s mine.”

“All right,” Mom said.

“I need to say something, and I need to say it in front of everybody, because that’s where I did it.” He swallowed. “Three weeks ago, on a Friday, I had forty-four people on a bus from Naperville and I wanted that corner. I told you booths aren’t assigned. And I let you walk out of my dining room.”