The Cider I Pressed by Hand

“I do not have six hundred this morning.”

“And I will haul it to your shed myself and set it on its feet. I do not think you should have to touch it after what was done.”

I had a jar of soft bills that came to maybe four hundred. I told him so, plain.

Rhoda from the egg stand was still standing by my fender. She reached into her apron and put two twenties in the jar.

The woman from the diner put in a fifty against the cider she still owed for. Kurt from the VFW put in a hundred and said it was a loan, and he knew where I lived.

Pastor Bream had already given, and he gave again.

It went around that market like water finding the low place, and it did not take five minutes.

I counted it out into Dell’s hand on the tailgate. Six hundred dollars, most of it in bills still warm from other people’s pockets.

He folded it away and shook my hand, and said he was sorry for his part, though he had no part to be sorry for.

The First Cup

While the money was still going around, a little girl worked her way up to the front of the line. She was maybe four years old, in a pink coat too big for her, holding her grandmother’s hand.

She had been watching the cider run into the jug the whole time with her mouth open.

Her grandmother leaned down and asked did she want to taste it.

I filled a little paper cup with cider straight off the press, cold and cloudy and sweet, and handed it down to her.

She drank it in one go.

She came up with a cider mustache and the most serious look on her small face, like she was deciding something important.

“That is the best thing I ever had,” she said.

And I was nine years old again, standing on a crate in my father’s shed in October while he held a cup up to my mouth.

Taste that, Maribeth, he said. We made that, you and me.

I had to turn around and wipe my face on my sleeve so the line would not see.

My father never let a child leave that stall without a cup. Not once in thirty years.

I had forgotten until that girl in the pink coat reminded me. And I knew right then that whatever Lyle took off me, he had not taken that.

It was not in the shed. It was in me.

I gave a cup to every child who came by the rest of the morning.