The Seat I Gave Miss Ada

My Sister’s Math

I need to be fair to Megan. She is my sister, and the church ladies in my own head will not let me be cruel about her on paper.

Megan runs the money side of the patch. She always has. She keeps the cash box, she sets the price, she counts the wristbands against the till at the end of every day.

Eight dollars a head. Kids under five free. She can tell you to the dollar what any given Saturday brought in.

She is good at it. I am not. I cut the maze rows, I load the hay, I fix the wagon when the tongue cracks.

I never once balanced the book in my life. I could not tell you what a Saturday brings in within a hundred dollars.

Somewhere in all that counting, I think, Megan started to believe something quiet and wrong.

She started to believe the people who paid were the real guests. The people who had always just been here became a kind of cost.

This was not the first time Megan had put a number ahead of a person. Two years back she wanted to charge the 4-H kids for their field trip, and I had to remind her whose grandmother ran our county fair booth for thirty years.

She is not hard all the way through. She cries at the right movies and she sits up all night with a sick calf the same as I do.

But she keeps a ledger in her head that I do not keep, and the ledger does not have a column for a woman who brings a spice cake and asks for nothing.

Carl’s folks were company she wanted to impress. His mother had made a comment the night before about the farm being rough, about the smell, about the mud on the lane.

So Megan wanted them up front. Waving. In the good light. In the pictures that would go back to Sioux Falls and settle the question of whether her people were anybody.

Ada does not pay eight dollars. Ada has never paid eight dollars in her life, and she never will, and that is exactly as it should be.

But my sister had quietly moved her into the column of things that do not pay. Into the column you can ask to step back.

I did not understand all of that standing by the barn. I understood it later, lying awake.

Standing by the barn, I just understood one thing. An old woman in her good coat had been told to step back, and she had, and nobody on that loaded wagon had said a word.

Harlan almost had. He was turned halfway round on the bench with the lines in his fist and his mouth open.

I saw him start to speak. Then I saw him stop.

Harlan works for us on a handshake. He is seventy-four. It is not his family, and I watched him decide it was not his place.

So it was going to have to be mine.