The Saturday Cash Box at the Festival

She laughed and cried at the same time, which is a sound I hope I never forget.

Then she did something she had not done since Walt’s funeral. She hugged me, hard, sugar and electrical tape and all, and I hugged her back.

Mike pulled up about then in the co-op bucket truck, which he is not supposed to bring to the festival, still in his hard hat and his orange vest.

He had been out since six in the morning on a pickup that took out a pole by the state road.

He took one look at the three of us standing at the table and at his sister’s face, and he did not ask me anything.

He got out of the truck and walked straight to Tricia and put his arms around her.

“Why didn’t you call me?” he said into the top of her head. “Three years ago. Why didn’t you just call me?”

“Because you’d have paid it,” she said into his vest.

“And then I’d have owed you too, and you’d never have let me pay you back, and I’d have had to watch your face every Christmas.”

Mike held on to her a long time. Then he said, quiet, “You’re watching it now, sis. It’s the same face. It’s going to be fine.”

While Mike and Tricia loaded the kettle, I walked Logan over to my car to give him his pay for the day.

Ten hours at fifteen dollars, a hundred and fifty, in an envelope with his name on it. He did not open it.

“Aunt Jolene,” he said, “did you hire me to catch her?”

I had made Mike a promise, and I had made it to myself too, that I would never put that boy in the middle.

But he was in the middle already, and he was asking me a straight question, and I was not going to lie to him on top of everything else.

“I hired you because you’re good with a count and you wanted that truck,” I said.

“And because I hoped your mom would rather tell the truth than carry it home again. I didn’t want you to be the one who found it. I’m sorry you were.”

He looked at the envelope in his hands. “She’d have kept doing it, wouldn’t she?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. Maybe not. People get stuck in a thing. That’s not the same as being a bad person, and your mom is not a bad person. She is a scared one who got caught in a hard year.”

He nodded. Then he said the thing that made me sit down on the bumper of my car.

“Can I work the stand next year?” he said. “I want to be the one who counts. Every day. Saturdays too. So nobody ever has to do it by themselves again.”

I told him yes. I told him he was hired for as long as he wanted the job, and that his grandpa would have paid him twenty an hour for that sentence alone.

He laughed and wiped his nose on the green hoodie, and then he went to help his uncle with the burner.

Sunday we worked the stand the way we had always worked it, only different. Tricia stirred again, without being asked.

I stood beside her and spelled her every hour so the blister would not open up. Logan ran the box, and counted out loud, and I watched the people.