Nine Saturdays at the Sale Barn

“We want them to sell,” I said.

She looked at Hailey. “This is for nationals?”

Hailey nodded. “Indianapolis. October.”

Marlene did not ask what happened to the money she must have known we had saved. In a town our size, people know when you are saving for something. They also know when to leave a question alone.

“You’ll want that spot by the south doors,” she said. “That’s where the buyers come in. And honey, you put a cover on those rolls. The flies in that barn have no shame.”

She checked with the county about it, too, because Marlene does everything right. Kansas lets a person sell baked goods like that without a license as long as there is nothing in them that needs a refrigerator. So I switched Grandma June’s cream cheese frosting to a powdered sugar and butter frosting, and nobody ever knew the difference.

That first Friday, we started baking at four in the afternoon, the minute I got home from the school. A batch of dough in my big mixing bowl, rising on the kitchen counter under dish towels while I fixed supper.

June’s recipe makes two dozen a batch. We made one batch that first week, because I did not believe anybody would buy more than that. Hailey rolled the dough out on the table. I spread the butter and the brown sugar and the cinnamon, and she rolled it up and cut it with thread the way her grandma taught her.

Saturday morning we were at the barn by seven. The sun was just up over the pens, pink and gold on the dust, and the first trucks and trailers were already backing up to the chutes to unload.

Randy carried the folding table in for us and set it by the south doors. He had borrowed a metal cash box from the church, the kind the ladies use for the bake sale. He kissed me on the head and went to the field.

Hailey wore her blue corduroy FFA jacket. I had not told her to. She just put it on that morning, zipped it up to the collar, and came out to the car in it.

“It’s going to be hot in here by nine,” I told her.

“I know,” she said. “But they should know what it’s for.”

Our first customer was a cattle buyer named Silas Stucky, who has bought calves at that barn for thirty years. He was carrying a cup of Marlene’s coffee and he stopped dead when he smelled the cinnamon.

“What’s this?” he said.

“Cinnamon rolls,” Hailey said. “Two dollars. I’m going to the national FFA convention in Indianapolis.”

He looked at the jacket. He looked at the rolls. He gave her a five and walked off before she could make change.

We sold out by nine-fifteen. Two dozen rolls. When we counted the cash box in the car, it came to seventy-four dollars. More than we had charged.

Hailey wrote it on a strip of masking tape. Week one, seventy-four dollars. She stuck it on the lid of a clean coffee can that Marlene had washed out for her.

I did not say anything about that can. I did not need to.