The Free Lemonade Stand We Built

The third Saturday, I watched my son count the cups.

Luke was seven, and he counted with his whole hand, folding one finger down for every paper cup he carried out to the folding table in front of the hardware store. He got to forty one and lost his place and started over, because Ava told him he had missed the two a man in a feed cap took for himself and his wife.

“Forty three,” Ava said. She was nine and she kept the real count in her head. “That’s forty three dollars, Luke.”

“Forty three dollars,” Luke said, like it was the biggest number in the world.

I stood on the sidewalk in the August heat with a grocery sack on my hip and let them believe it a minute longer. Then Roy came out of the store in his green apron, the one with NELSON HARDWARE stitched over the pocket, and he lifted the cash box off the table before either child could touch it.

“Good day, team,” he said. He said it warm. He always said it warm.

He carried the box inside, past the rakes and the paint shaker and the bins of loose nails, and he rang it into the register the way he rang in a sale of garden hose. The drawer slid shut with that small heavy sound a register makes. Forty three dollars went in behind the glass.

My kids watched the drawer close. Then they looked at me.

Ava did not say anything. She had stopped saying anything by the third Saturday. But Luke still had the whole hand held up, four fingers folded, the way you hold a number you are proud of, and he lowered it slow, one finger at a time, until there was nothing to hold.