Dad settled back into his chair, looked my uncle dead in the eye, and what happened next that family will be telling for years, because for thirty-four years my father had risen from that table and walked out to the porch when the needling started, and this Sunday he did not walk anywhere.
He set his fork down, quiet, and he said to my uncle: you ate shrimp tonight. You have eaten it at this table every Sunday for thirty years. Where do you think it comes from.
The table went still.
Then Dad kept on, and his voice stayed low and even, which is how you knew he meant every word. He said he had worked a shrimp boat out of Biloxi for thirty-four years, out on the Gulf before dawn, in weather that has drowned better men, so that his kids would never have to. He said he had fixed my uncles boat, my uncles truck, my uncles roof, and never once taken a dime. And he said he was done being treated like the rough one who married in.
Then he reached into his jacket and set something on the table, and it was not money and not anger, it was a worn photograph of my uncle as a young man, standing proud on the deck of Dads boat, holding up his first big catch, grinning like a boy.
Nobody at that table had known. Thirty years back, when my uncle was young and broke and between jobs, before all the soft-handed lettered success, it was my father who took him out on the Gulf and taught him to work, put money in his pocket for a whole hard season until he got on his feet.
Dad slid the photo across. He said, I have never once brought this up, because a man does not hold a kindness over another mans head. But I will not sit here and be lectured on hard work by a man I taught it to.
My uncle looked at that photograph of himself, young and grateful on my fathers deck, and something in his face just came apart. He had forgotten. Or made himself forget. And here it was in his own hands.
He stood up, and this big lettered man walked around the table and hugged my father, my salt-and-sun father with the ruined hands, and said he was sorry, that he had forgotten who he was, that he had forgotten who had shown him.
The whole family saw it. My father, who had spent thirty-four years exiled to the porch, sat at the center of the table for the rest of that evening, and my uncle sat beside him, and for the first time in my life I heard my uncle ask my father to tell the old stories about the water.
Dad still runs his boat out of Biloxi. But he does not leave the table anymore. There is no reason to.