The Stand I Set at My Own Lane

How Gary Took The Stand

Virgil and I started the stand the fall our daughter started kindergarten, which makes it older than Gary by two years. It was never a business the way Gary talks about business. It was a card table and a coffee can for the money and whatever the garden gave us that we could not eat ourselves.

People stopped. That was the point of it. You cannot know a county road until you have sat at the end of it and watched who comes by.

We sold sweet corn in August by the dozen in a feed sack. We sold tomatoes that split if you looked at them wrong. By October it was the shocks and the gourds and the mums I potted up in the spring and babied all summer on the back step.

The money went in the coffee can and the coffee can went toward whatever was short that year. One year it bought our daughter’s class ring. One year it just bought propane. It was never much and it was never nothing.

Virgil loved the sitting more than the selling. He would carry two lawn chairs down and a transistor radio, and we would watch the Dillmans’ beans turn gold across the road, and half the people who stopped did not buy a thing and he counted that a good day anyhow.

“You don’t run a stand to get rich, Eunie,” he told me once. “You run it so the road knows you’re still here.”

I did not understand how true that was until the autumn I am telling you about. Until the autumn a man decided the road did not need to know me anymore.

Virgil died in March of this year. His heart, in the night, quiet, the way he did most things. I found him in his chair with the farm report still talking on the radio.

Gary drove down from Lafayette the next week and stayed through the funeral and a good while after. He was a comfort. I will not pretend he was not. He mowed and he fixed the gutter and he sat with me at the kitchen table when the house got too loud with its own silence.

Then one evening in September he set his coffee down and told me he had been thinking.

“Mom, you can’t do the stand this year,” he said. “Not by yourself. Not now.”

I told him I had done it the year Virgil had his knee done, alone, every Saturday, and sold out of mums by Columbus Day.

“That was years ago,” Gary said. “You’re sixty-eight. You were out there in July heat weeding and you got dizzy. Dana saw you sit down in the dirt.”

I had sat down in the dirt because I wanted to look at a toad. I did not tell him that. It sounded like something a woman past it would say.

“I’m not asking you, Mom,” he said, gentler, which was worse. “I already decided. It’s for the best.”

For the best. I had heard those three words at the hospital in March and I had heard them from the funeral director and now I was hearing them from my own son across my own table.

I wanted to tell him that I had buried my husband and run this house and this garden and this stand, and that the last thing on God’s earth I needed was to be decided about. I did not say it. I have learned that the words you swallow at the table you can use better later.