The Saturday Cash Box at the Festival

The silence was longer this time. I could hear her television in the background and Vince saying something about the weather.

“Daddy always had me on the box,” she said.

“I know he did,” I said. “Eight years I’ve stirred. I think it’s your turn.”

She did not argue. She said, “Fine. I’ll bring the oil and the sugar, you get the propane,” the way we had said it every year, and she hung up a little faster than she usually did.

We set up Thursday night after supper with Mike’s work lights and the pickup backed up on the east side of the courthouse square, the same spot Walt had for twenty years, between the apple butter kettles and the funnel cake trailer.

Friday morning I opened the cash box at seven and counted the bank in front of Logan, out loud. Two hundred dollars in fives and ones.

I wrote it at the top of the tally sheet and initialed it, and then I handed him the pencil and had him initial it under me.

“Why do we both sign it?” he asked.

“Because your grandpa said one name on a tally is a rumor,” I said. “Two names is a count.”

He thought that was the best thing he had ever heard. He wrote his initials very neatly, L.B., like he was signing a check at the bank.

Tricia came at seven thirty with the oil and the sugar and her black apron already tied on.

She hugged Logan and said good morning to me, and then she went to the kettle and lit the burner without another word.

All day Friday Logan sold bags and counted change out loud. “Ten dollars, out of twenty, that’s ten back, there’s your ten, have a good one.”

He made the old men laugh. He made the little kids pick their own bag off the rack.

At eight in the morning I paid him for his first hour, a ten and a five, because Walt always paid new help after the first hour so they would know the money was real.

Logan looked at it like it was a hundred dollar bill.

Then he folded it into his hoodie pocket and walked straight over to the funnel cake trailer.

He came back with a funnel cake on a paper plate, powdered sugar blowing all down the front of him, and set it on the table in front of me.

“What’s this?” I said.

“You’ve stirred that thing for eight years and Grandpa used to say whoever stirs gets the first funnel cake,” he said.

“You never once got one hot. I always saw you eating it cold at four o’clock.”

I had to turn around and look at the courthouse clock for a minute so he would not see my face.

Eight dollars out of a fifteen dollar first hour. That boy did not have to notice anything about me, and he had noticed that.

Then he tore off a third of it and carried it over to the kettle on a napkin and held it up for his mother to take a bite, because her hands were full of the paddle.

She leaned down and took it right out of his fingers like he was still two years old.

I saw her eyes go wet, and I told myself it was the steam. Later I thought maybe it was not.

By ten o’clock Tricia’s face was red as a stop sign.