The Stand I Set at My Own Lane

The Lane Got Busy

By eleven I had sold every shock in the barn.

I had sold the gourds and I had sold both my mums and a woman I did not know bought the river rock off my sign because she liked the looks of it, and I let her have it for a dollar and used my coffee thermos to weight the sign instead.

Cars I knew and cars I did not know came down that county road and slowed at my lane. Some of them had driven right past Gary’s bright stand to do it.

Edith Combs came and bought three gourds and told me her Harold had passed in June and that she understood more than she could say. We held hands over the card table a minute, two widows in the cold, and neither of us said his name and both of us meant it.

A man in a work truck I did not know pulled in and bought a shock for his wife’s porch. He said a fellow at the gas station told him the real ones were down this way.

“Real ones,” I said. “As opposed to what?”

“Store ones, I guess,” he said. “Fella was pretty worked up about it.” He tipped his cap and drove off with my shock in the bed.

The Vorhees girl, grown now with a baby of her own in the back seat, came by the first time around ten and bought a mum and asked a hundred questions about the shocks. Pastor Dean came and did not buy anything because he does not have a yard for a shock, but he stood and visited twenty minutes and bought a jar of my chokecherry jam that I had on the table as an afterthought.

A woman rolled down her window and did not even get out.

“Are you the one from the gas station story?” she asked.

“I suppose I might be,” I said.

“Give me two,” she said, and handed a twenty across and would not wait for change, and was gone before I could thank her.

I ran out of everything and I sat at my empty card table in the good cold sun and I was happier than I had been since the March morning I found Virgil in his chair.

And then I saw Gary’s truck come down the road from his stand, slow, and pull into the lane, and stop.