"Vandermause, six!" Bonnie Tetzlaff sang it over the fryer roar like a woman calling bingo at the Legion. "Relish tray's on the cart, hon — grab it going past and save my steps."
Friday fish fry at the Wagon Wheel, the first after Labor Day, and the gravel lot off the bay road north of New Ghent was parked to the ditch weeds by six, the double doors propped open to a soft south wind off the water. Door County was shedding its tourists; the dining room had gone back to Wisconsin vowels. Nobody had told the perch.
Dorothy Mercier had been eating fish fry in this room since she was tall enough to see over a relish tray, and she priced the evening the way she priced everything: perch plate at sixteen ninety-five, brandy old-fashioned sweet at six and a quarter, and Bonnie comping crayons, a Sprite, and a second basket of rye to a table of grandchildren gone feral, none of it written down.
"Forty-minute wait, and she's got every name in it filed," Lu said across the four-top, watching Bonnie steer a walker, two birthdays, and a spilled Shirley Temple without breaking stride. "If St. Hubert's ran on Bonnie Tetzlaff, we'd all be saved by Tuesday."
Peg forked a bite of Dot's coleslaw, chewed, and handed down the ruling. "Too much sugar."
"Yours is free," Dot said.
"That's the secret ingredient."
Bonnie blew past with rye baskets up one arm. "Dot, hon, you're down a drink — old-fashioned's coming, brandy, sweet, don't argue. Lu, your minnow man called here, of all places. Kitchen's drowning, love you, bye." Gone, into the weather of the room.
At the carving station Kurt Vandehey laid prime rib in doubled apron strings, sleeves shoved to the elbow. "Same batter since 1982," he told the Vanden Heuvel booth, answering a question nobody had asked. "That doesn't change. I'm not going anywhere, and neither is the perch." Between cuts he checked his phone, twice, and pocketed it like it had bitten him.
Dale Detloff was down from Green Bay in a golf shirt the color of orange sherbet, working the aisle with a hand for every shoulder and a toothpick riding the corner of his smile. "Best Friday north of Milwaukee, chief." Then, at the Delfosse table: "Fourteen hundred covers a night in here, hon. Easy. Ask anybody." Dot ran the count off the register line: four hundred, on a big night. Dale rounded up the way other men breathed.
The end of the bar held the one still thing in the room — a silver bob, a navy coat that had never bought bait, a brandy old-fashioned sweet going down slower than communion wine.
"Hotel outfit's scout," Lu said, following Dot's look. "Renting up at the Bayside Inn in Sturgeon Bay since July. Comes in Fridays, orders one drink, tips fine, watches."
"Watches what?"
"Same thing you watch. Everything."
"And what's she waiting on?"
"What do the gulls wait on?" Lu stacked dirty baskets. "Somebody to drop something."
The woman wasn't sightseeing. She read the exits, the staff, the photo wall, left to right, like a statement she meant to reconcile. Dot knew that posture. She had worn it for a living.
Orv made his rounds with a coffeepot he had no business hauling, full first names at every table, and fetched up at the pharmacist's four-top like a barge docking.
"Aldo Boulanger." The pot came down like a gavel. "Forty years I've taken the little yellow ones. First of the month I pick up my refill, and the bottle's full of white. Same pill, says your bag. How's a man supposed to know? A man my age goes by color, like ducks."
"Ducks," said Gus Delfosse, two chairs down.
"You know a mallard by the head, Gus. I know my pills by the color of them."
Aldo tucked his napkin tighter, collar ironed even on a Friday night. "The wholesaler changed, Orville. It is printed on the label, which I observe you have not read. Past that, I can neither confirm nor deny at a fish fry."
The laugh ran from the bar to the family tables and rolled on into the Packers' opener without a seam. Orv carried his coffeepot toward the kitchen, grumbling at the swinging door. "White," he told it, and went through.
Ellen Mercier had liked the perch too. She would finish her own and start in on her daughter's coleslaw without a word of treaty, and thirty-six years after the last time, Dot caught herself eating with a forearm curled around her plate. Old guard duty. She left the arm where it was.
At the register Orv rang her out himself, half-glasses down his nose, counting change like the bank was watching. "Sunday week, Dorothy."
"I haven't forgotten."
"Didn't figure you had." The drawer shut under his hip. "Bring nothing — I'll feed you."
"You feed everybody."
"Everybody's not you, Dorothy."
Lu caught her at the door, register cash in one fist. "Sunday week. You going to tell me what he's handing you?"
"Supper," Dot said, and let the door and the warm dark have the rest.
Sunday the club served its early dinner and emptied by eight, the way it had since Marion died. The wind came around to the north after sundown, the first cold breath of the fall, headed for forty-eight by morning. By half past eight the only lights on the bay road were the office lamp downstairs and the television flicker upstairs, where the Packers had won their opener and the highlights were running long.
In the office, Bonnie fed the Friday take through the adding machine twice, the tape curling into the wastebasket, and married the total to the register tapes with a paper clip. The deposit bag zipped. She rinsed her coffee cup, squared the desk blotter, took her keys off the hook.
Upstairs, Orv stood at the kitchenette counter in his Sunday cardigan, the week's organizer open beside the coffee maker, thumbing pills from the new bottle — white, and he muttered at them on principle — one into each little door, seven in all. Sunday's he tipped back into his palm and took with tap water, and the crowd noise from the television walked him back to the recliner.
Bonnie called up the stairwell with her keys in her hand. "Take's counted and bagged. I'm running it up to the bank."
"Want company for the ride?"
"You'd talk football at me past the county line."
"And you'd be improved by it."
The screen door braced against her hip. "Watch your highlights. I'll be home for the ten o'clock news, same as ever."
At the next commercial Orv dialed the farmhouse on County K and let it ring through to the beep. "Dorothy. Orv Detloff. Don't cook next Sunday — I'll feed you here. And I'll have what I promised. Sunday week. That's settled then."
Taillights ran north up the bay road toward Sturgeon Bay, twelve miles of dark shore, and were gone. Above the club the window burned television blue awhile, then lamp yellow, then out.
The organizer sat by the coffee maker, seven little doors shut, the week squared away. Fog would be on the harbor by five. Somewhere between the highlights and the morning, someone came back.
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