The Free Lemonade Stand We Built
How it started
It started kind, the way the hardest things do.
Roy had run the hardware store on Main for thirty one years. His father ran it before him. When Ted and I moved back to Fredonia so Ted could take over the plumbing supply side, Roy got it in his head that the grandkids ought to learn the store. He was not wrong to want that. A family business that nobody under sixty wants is a sad thing, and I had seen enough of those on our square, the windows soaped over, the names still painted on the brick.
So in July he set a cooler out front. A big yellow Igloo, the kind you haul to a ball game, and he filled it with lemonade he mixed from the powder tubs he sold in the housewares aisle. He printed a little sign on his computer. LEMONADE $1. He set Ava and Luke behind the table in two folding chairs and he told them they were open for business.
The first Saturday they sold out by noon. People love a kid at a lemonade stand. Half the town came by just to put a dollar in two small hands and tell them what good workers they were. The county road crew bought a round. Pastor Dale bought three. A woman from the quilt shop took a picture for the Facebook page.
The kids came home glowing. Luke told his daddy they had made fifty eight dollars. Ava corrected him, sixty one, and I remember thinking, that is a good lesson, that is exactly the kind of thing a grandpa should do.
I did not ask where the sixty one dollars was. I assumed it was theirs. You assume a lot about the people you married into, early on. You assume the warm voice means what warm voices mean.
The second Saturday they made about the same. And that night at supper Ava asked her grandfather, careful, the way she asks for things she is not sure she is allowed, if she could use her lemonade money to buy a pair of roller skates she had seen.
Roy set down his fork.
“Now that,” he said, “is a conversation worth having.”
What a lesson is
Roy explained it to me in the back of the store, by the key machine, with his reading glasses pushed up on his head.
“The money stays in the business,” he said. “That’s the lesson, Megan. Nothing is free. You don’t just take money out of a register because you want skates. The register pays for the powder, the cups, the cooler, the electricity that keeps the store cool enough that people want to stand in it. The children are learning how a business actually works. Earnings go back in. That’s how my dad taught me and that’s how I run this place.”
“They’re seven and nine,” I said.
“And they’ll be eight and ten,” he said. “And someday they’ll understand why I didn’t hand them sixty dollars to blow on skates. You’ll thank me.”
I want to be fair to him, because this story does not work if I make him a monster, and he was not a monster. Roy came up with nothing. His father lost the store once, in the eighties, and clawed it back by sleeping in the stockroom. Roy learned young that a dollar you spend is a dollar that can sink you, and he loved my children enough to want them armored against that. He truly believed he was giving them something.
But here is the part he could not see. The powder cost him maybe four dollars a tub. The cups came in a sleeve for a couple of bucks. The cooler he already owned. The store was already cool and already lit. The forty three dollars my son counted on the third Saturday was not going to keep the lights on. It was going into a register that took in nine or ten thousand dollars a month without any help from a lemonade cooler.
My kids were not learning how a business works. They were working three hours in the heat and watching a drawer close on everything they made. That is not a lesson about money. That is a lesson about who the money belongs to, and they were learning it fast.