The Free Lemonade Stand We Built

Mr. Dunbar

Mr. Dunbar cut hair two doors down from the hardware store. He had cut hair on that square for longer than Roy had sold nails. His shop was one chair, a row of cracked vinyl seats that nobody sat in anymore, a jar of combs in blue water, and a radio that only got the AM station out of Chanute.

Nobody got their hair cut at Dunbar’s anymore. The young ones drove to the chain place by the highway, twelve dollars and they take walk ins. The old ones who used to fill his chairs had mostly passed. Mr. Dunbar was eighty one and his hands shook now, and getting a cut from him was a thirty minute act of patience and love, and the town had quietly decided it did not have the time.

But every Saturday, Mr. Dunbar walked out of his shop in his white barber smock, came down to the hardware store, and bought one cup of lemonade from my kids for a dollar.

I had thought he just liked lemonade. Ava set him straight.

“He doesn’t even drink it, Mama,” she told me. “He holds it. And when he thinks we’re not looking he pours it in the planter by the door. He just comes to talk to us.”

He came to talk to them. An old man with an empty shop, who walked down the block every Saturday and spent a dollar he could not spare on a cup he poured into a planter, so that for ten minutes somebody on that square would talk to him. And my father in law had been ringing that old man’s dollar into his register for three weeks and calling it a lesson.

That was the thing that turned the key in me. Not the roller skates. Not my own pride. It was a seven year old asking from the back seat whether a lonely old man would be sad we were closed.

I pulled into our driveway. I sat there a second with the engine off.

“We’re not closed next week,” I told Luke. “We’re moving.”