Two Cokes on a Friday
Part One: Fish Night
Gil froze behind the bar with a dish towel in his hand.
It was a quarter past five on a Friday in early March. Fish night. The early crowd was already in. Retired men from the paper mill at the end of the bar, working through their first plate of perch. Couples in the booths along the wall. Two tables of bowlers from the Thursday league who always came in on Fridays to argue about Thursday.
The jukebox was playing Patsy Cline.
Then it wasn’t. Somebody must have pulled the plug, or the song just ended, and nobody put in another quarter.
The tables behind us went quiet, one at a time.
I could feel it happen. Like a wave going out. First the booth closest to us. Then the bowlers. Then the couples by the window.
The men at the end of the bar stopped eating. They set down their forks.
They stared.
My grandmother sat on a barstool at the center of the bar. Right in front of the taps. Right where Gil couldn’t look anywhere else.
She was eighty-six years old.
She was wearing her royal blue wool coat. The good one. The one she wears to funerals and to Christmas Eve Mass and to absolutely nothing else. Pearl earrings that my grandfather gave her for their fortieth anniversary. Her white curls set that morning at the beauty shop on Main Street, the way they’ve been set every Friday since 1961.
Two glass bottles of Coca-Cola sat on the bar in front of her. The old-fashioned kind, with the bottle caps already popped off. Sweating a little in the warmth of the bar.
I stood beside her in my camel coat with my hand on her back.
Going there was Grandma’s idea, not mine.
I want you to know that. I want everyone to know that.
If it had been up to me, I’d have gone home and cried in the bathtub and never set foot in Pliska’s Tap again.
Part Two: Pliska’s Tap
Pliska’s Tap sits on the corner of Second and Clark in Mosinee, Wisconsin. A little paper mill town on the Wisconsin River, fifteen miles south of Wausau.
It’s a two-story brick building with a green awning and a neon Leinenkugel’s sign in the front window. The upstairs is an apartment. The downstairs is the bar.
Stan Pliska opened it in 1971.
He was my husband’s father. He came home from Vietnam in 1969 with a bad knee and a little bit of money and a big laugh. He bought the building from a widow whose husband had run it as a tavern since the end of Prohibition.
He named it after himself. He hung his Army discharge papers behind the bar in a frame. He started a Friday fish fry the first week, because every bar in Wisconsin has a Friday fish fry, and if you don’t, nobody comes.
For fifty years, Pliska’s was the place.
Mill workers stopped in after second shift. The Lions Club met there on Tuesdays. The bowling leagues came after their games. Wedding receptions in the back room. Funeral lunches. Graduation parties.
Every Friday, the line for fish went out the door.
Stan died in 2014.
His oldest son, Gil, took over the bar.
Part Three: Russ
My name is Shari Pliska. I’m forty-one years old.
I’m a teller at the Mosinee branch of River Valley Credit Union. I’ve worked there for eighteen years. I count other people’s money all day. I balance my drawer to the penny every night.
I’ve been married to Russ Pliska for nineteen years.
Russ is Stan’s younger son. He’s forty-three. He works second shift at the paper mill, running a winder. He’s worked there since he was nineteen, same as his father did before Stan bought the bar.
He’s a good man.
I need to say that before I say anything else.
He’s kind. He’s gentle. He’s patient with my grandmother and with the neighbor kids who throw their football over our fence. He fixes things for people without being asked. He cries at the end of Field of Dreams.
He has one weakness.
He never once told his big brother no.
Gil is six years older. When Russ was a little boy, Gil was the one who taught him to ride a bike and throw a spiral and bait a hook. When Russ was in high school, Gil was the one who drove him to every basketball game in his rusted Chevy.
When their mother left in 1988, Gil was the one who made Russ’s lunches.
Russ worships him.
So when Gil needs something, Russ gives it.
Five hundred dollars in 2016, for a new beer cooler. Russ said it was a loan. I never saw it again.
Two thousand in 2019, for a lawyer, after a slip-and-fall lawsuit. Russ said Gil would pay it back. He didn’t.
Twelve hundred in 2021, for the property taxes. That one I found out about when I saw the check clear.
I said something every time.
Russ would look at me with his sad brown eyes and say, “He’s my brother, Shar. He’s all I’ve got left of Dad.”
And I’d let it go.
Part Four: Grandma Flossie
My grandmother is Florence Duda. Everybody calls her Flossie.
She was born in 1939 in a farmhouse outside Rhinelander. She married my grandfather, Leo Duda, in 1958. They moved to Mosinee in 1960 when he got a job at the paper mill.
She worked, too. In the 1970s, when Grandpa was laid off for two years during a strike, she got a job cooking.
At Pliska’s Tap.
She was Stan’s first fish fry cook.
From 1971 to 1985, every Friday, Flossie Duda stood in the little kitchen at the back of Pliska’s Tap and fried fish. Walleye and perch and bluegill. In a beer batter she made from scratch, with Leinenkugel’s and flour and a little bit of paprika and a secret she never told anybody.
She made coleslaw. Potato pancakes. Rye bread from a bakery in Wausau. Tartar sauce in a big stainless steel bowl.
Stan used to say the line went out the door because of her batter.
That’s how I met Russ.
I was twenty-one. I was visiting Grandma at her house on a Sunday afternoon. Stan Pliska stopped by to drop off a casserole dish she’d left at the bar thirty years ago. He’d found it in a cupboard.
He brought his son along.
Grandma and I raised our families on the same streets as the Pliskas. We’ve gone to the same church. We’ve sat in the same bleachers at the same high school football games.
When Stan died in 2014, Grandma sat in the front row at his funeral.
She cried harder than his own sons.
Part Five: Forty Acres
Last spring, Grandma sold my grandpa’s forty acres of hunting land.
Grandpa died in 2017. He left her the land up north, near Tomahawk. Forty acres of pine and birch and swamp, with an old deer stand and a little cabin with no running water.
He’d hunted there every November since 1962.
Grandma couldn’t use it. She’s eighty-six. She hasn’t been up there since the funeral.
The taxes were killing her. The cabin roof was falling in. A neighbor kept calling to say kids were partying out there on weekends.
So she sold it. To a family from Minneapolis who wanted somewhere to go on weekends.
She got a hundred and twenty thousand dollars.
She put most of it in a CD at my credit union. For her funeral, she said. For her nursing home, if it ever comes to that.
And she gave us forty-three thousand of it.
She did it at her kitchen table. In April. Russ and me sitting across from her. She wrote the check herself, in her careful Palmer Method handwriting.
Pay to the order of Russell and Shari Pliska. Forty-three thousand dollars and no cents.
“For a house,” she said.
She slid the check across the table.
“Not a duplex,” she said. “Where the landlord never shovels.”
We’d been renting a duplex on Fourth Street for nineteen years.
Two bedrooms. One bathroom. Shared basement with a neighbor who plays heavy metal at two in the morning. A landlord named Mr. Krebsbach who lives in Arizona and never once shoveled the walk.
Grandma slipped on that walk in January. She broke her wrist.
“Forty-three thousand,” she said. “That’s twenty percent down on a little place. I looked it up.”
She looked at Russ.
“Leo wanted you two to have a house,” she said. “He said so before he died. He said Shari’s lived in other people’s buildings her whole life.”
She looked at me.
“Find something with a garage,” she said. “So you don’t have to scrape your windshield.”
We cried.
Both of us. At her kitchen table. Russ held her hand for a long time.
“Thank you, Flossie,” he said. “Thank you. We’ll make Leo proud.”
We put the check in our joint savings account at River Valley.
And we started looking for a house.
