The Saturday Cash Box at the Festival

Then Mike came in from mowing in his sock feet and asked why I had his daddy’s tally books all over the table, and I just turned the three Saturday sheets around so he could read them.

He read them twice. He set them down. He went to the sink and ran a glass of water and drank the whole thing standing up, which is what Mike does when he does not want to say the first thing that comes into his head.

“Could be she just quit marking ticks,” he said finally. “Could be the count’s right and the ticks got lazy.”

“Look at Friday and Sunday the same years,” I said.

“Same weather, same prices. Saturday’s the parade, Mike. Saturday has never once been our slow day. Your dad would have come out of his grave over a five hundred ninety dollar Saturday.”

He did not argue. He sat down across from me and put his big hands flat on the table on either side of the sheets, like they might blow away.

He has been climbing poles for twenty years, and his knuckles look like walnuts.

“Three Octobers ago,” he said. “That’s the year Vince lost the plant job.”

I had already thought of that. Vince Bauer, Tricia’s husband, worked eighteen years at the auto parts plant up the highway before it shut down one line and cut half the second shift. He was out of work most of that winter.

He found a job at the lumber yard by spring and has been there since.

Tricia never said one word about money that year, not at Thanksgiving, not at Christmas. She brought the same green bean casserole and the same pumpkin roll she always brings.

I want to answer the question I know some of you are already asking, because I asked it myself that night lying in bed.

Why not just carry the sheets over to her house and set them on her kitchen table?

Because I knew exactly how that would go. Tricia would say I had counted wrong, or that Saturdays were rainy, or that the sheets were Walt’s old ones mixed in.

And Mike would be stuck standing between his wife and his only sister at every holiday for the rest of his life.

And I was not going to anybody official over it either. It was family money from a festival stand, and Mike was never going to take his sister to court over kettle corn, and neither was I.

The tally sheets were proof for the family. They were never going to be anything more.

Mike said it out loud, too, so I would know where he stood.

“I’m not suing my sister, Jo. I’m not calling anybody. I want you to know that before you decide anything.”

“I don’t want to sue her,” I said. “I want her to stop. And I want her to be the one who tells it. Not me, not you, and not some piece of paper out of your mother’s garage.”

“How do you make somebody tell the truth?”

“You don’t,” I said. “You just take away the dark she’s been keeping it in.”

That is a nicer sentence than what I actually felt at the time, which was a lot closer to plain mad.

I want to be honest about that, because the rest of this does not make sense if you think I was some kind of saint about it. I was not.

The answer walked into my kitchen in August in a pair of muddy work boots.