The Saturday Cash Box at the Festival

So I stirred. If you have never stirred kettle corn, it is a wooden paddle the length of a canoe oar, a kettle hot enough to raise blisters through leather gloves, and sugar that turns from perfect to black in about four seconds if you look away.

There was one more piece of the arrangement, and it is the piece that matters.

On Saturday nights of the festival, the school corporation runs shuttle buses from the high school lot to the square for the parade and the street dance.

I have driven that shuttle every year since I got my bus license. It pays time and a half, and it pays for our Christmas.

So every Saturday of the festival I stirred until half past four, washed my arms in the cooler, and walked to the bus barn.

That left Tricia to close the stand on Saturday alone.

She would count the box, write the number on Walt’s tally sheet, and take the box home to her kitchen, because it was too much cash to leave on the square overnight.

On Sunday night we would sit in her kitchen with all three days of tally sheets and split it.

Friday and Sunday I counted with her. Saturday I took her word. It never once crossed my mind not to. She was family.

Walt had been particular about the tally sheets. He bought carbon books from the office supply in Bedford, and every bag sold got a tick mark under small or large, and at closing you added the ticks and checked them against the cash.

In July Mike’s mother sold her house and moved into the senior apartments behind the hospital.

We cleaned out her garage, and in a tub marked kettle in Walt’s handwriting were all his tally books and, on top, all of ours, eight years of them.

The first thing I noticed was that the Saturday sheets for the last three years did not look like the others.

Every Friday and every Sunday had rows of tick marks in pencil, mine or Tricia’s, crossed off in fives the way Walt taught us.

The last three Saturdays had no tick marks at all.

Each one had a date, a single number written in Tricia’s round handwriting, and her initials. Six hundred forty. Seven hundred ten. Five hundred ninety.

I laid all eight years out in a row. For the first five years, Saturday was always the biggest day, which it should be, because Saturday is the parade and the antique tractor pull and the day the whole county comes to town.

Those first five Saturdays ran between two thousand and twenty-three hundred dollars. Fridays ran around fourteen hundred.

Sundays ran around thirteen hundred, a little less if it rained. The last three Fridays and Sundays looked exactly like the first five.

Only the Saturdays had fallen off a cliff. Three years in a row, on the busiest day of the festival, with the same kettle and the same prices and the same crowd, my sister-in-law had written down about a third of what the day should have made.

I did the arithmetic with a pencil on the back of a light bill. Figure about fifteen hundred dollars missing each of those three Saturdays.

Call it forty-four hundred in all, and my half of that came to about twenty-two hundred dollars.

I sat there long enough that the ice in my tea melted.