Wes had the fryer going by eleven, out in his sister's yard in Pembroke, with a stack of cornmeal-dredged catfish on a sheet pan and his cousin standing over his shoulder giving advice nobody asked for. The tables were set up under two pop-up tents. Somebody had a speaker going with old gospel. And Shirley, Wes's mother, was sitting in the best lawn chair in the shade, pretending she didn't know all of this was for her.
She turned 70 this month. The Saturday of Labor Day weekend, about 30 people came to eat fish and tell her so.
Why this weekend wasn't a trip
We had just come back from Charlotte the weekend before, and for months our plan was to keep September quiet anyway. The big one is coming in October: a cabin near Boone that we booked back in April. So September's $250 is staying in the trip account to help cover that.
But even if we'd had a trip planned, this would have won. Shirley doesn't ask for much. She has been widowed since 2019, she goes to church every Sunday and she has opinions about my cornbread that she has shared generously for fifteen years. When Tonya called in July and said she wanted to do a fish fry for Mama's 70th, everybody said yes before she finished the sentence.
Wes's family is big, and they've done enough fish fries to have a system. Tonya hosted, since she has the yard. Each family took a piece of it.
- Wes's brother and his wife brought the sides: slaw, potato salad, baked beans and a mountain of hushpuppy batter.
- Tonya and her husband handled the tents, tables, chairs and drinks.
- Two cousins brought desserts, which meant three banana puddings and a pound cake, because in this family two is never enough.
- Wes and I covered the fish, the frying oil and the cornmeal, and I put together a framed photo for Shirley.
Wes was the obvious choice for the fish. He fishes the Lumber River for bream and catfish, and he had a good bit of bream in the freezer from the summer, cleaned and bagged. But for 30 people we needed more than one man's summer, so we bought catfish fillets too.
What our share cost
I kept the receipts, of course, but they went in a separate envelope. This came out of our regular checking, not the trip account. Here's our share:
- Twelve pounds of catfish fillets at $7 a pound: $84
- Peanut oil and cornmeal (our part of it): $28
- Printing six old family photos and a frame: $28
That's $140 total. Wes's frozen bream we counted as free, although Wes says his time on the river is worth something. I told him we can talk about that when he starts charging the fish.
The frame was my idea. I went through boxes at Shirley's house over the summer, with Tonya's help and without Shirley knowing, and found photos of her as a girl, on her wedding day, holding Wes as a baby and with her late husband at a church homecoming. I had them printed in Laurinburg and put them in a six-picture frame. She didn't say much when she opened it. She just held it for a long time, and then she said, "Your cornbread was fine today, Heather." I'm counting that as the best review I'll ever get.
What a weekend at home gave us
We usually spend the money we make on weekends somewhere else, two hours or four hours down the road. This weekend we spent it twelve minutes away, on fish and family, and nobody had to sleep in a motel.
There was a lot of good talk. Cousins who live in Raleigh and Baltimore came in, and Wes spent most of the afternoon at the fryer catching up on a year of news. Late in the day, after the fish was gone, everybody sang to Shirley and she pretended to be embarrassed. June stayed home, which was right; thirty people and a fryer is not her kind of party.
We drove home around eight with a foil pan of leftover hushpuppies on my lap. It wasn't a trip, but I'll remember it longer than most of them. Next month we head to the mountains. This month we stayed put, and that was the right call.
