I sat down on the old basement couch where those men had sat for thirty years, tin in my lap, because what my father had hidden behind that dartboard was every friend he had ever lost.
Inside, laid flat, was a photograph of eight young men crowded around a card table, beers up, grinning — my father in the middle, maybe thirty years old, before I was born. And around the photograph, each wrapped in its own scrap of paper, was a small collection of things. A single poker chip. A worn dart with red flights. A pocketknife. A harmonica. A dented lighter. A St. Christopher medal. Eight objects, and eight men, and I understood before I had even unwrapped them all.
Every time one of the Friday-night men died, my father took one small thing that had been his — a chip he always played, the dart he threw, the lighter he flicked all through those thirty years of poker — and he wrapped it up and slid it into the tin behind the dartboard. He kept his friends there. All of them. In the room where they had lived their best hours.
Folded under the photograph was a paper, and on it, in my father’s cramped hand, was a list. Eight names. Beside each one a date, and a single line. “Ray — could never bluff to save his life — 1998.” “Big Tom — always brought the good chips — 2004.” “Sal — cried at every wedding, tough as nails — 2011.” A private eulogy, one line at a time, added to over three decades as the chairs around that table emptied one by one.
I always wondered why my father kept the dartboard up after the last of his friends was gone. Habit, I told myself. Company of a sort. I had it half right. It was company — but not the board. It was the eight men sealed in a cookie tin behind it, the whole Friday-night crew, still in the room, still keeping him company every time he came downstairs.
At the bottom of the list, in different ink, added last, my father had written a line to me: “When it’s my turn, put something of mine in here with the boys, and keep the tin, and don’t be a stranger to your own friends. The Fridays are the whole thing, son. The Fridays are the whole thing.”
I did what he asked. I put his reading glasses in the tin, with the boys, and his name at the bottom of the list, and the date. And I did not donate the dartboard. It is up in my basement now.
And I called three men I had been too busy for, and we play cards on Fridays now, the way our fathers did, in a paneled room, getting older together. Because my father was right. The work and the worry and all the rest of it fade. The Fridays are the whole thing. He kept his in a tin for thirty years so I would finally understand that. I understand it now.
