The Lemonade Stand Across the Midway

How It Started

I should tell you who we are. My name is Kendra Hoefling. I am forty-four years old and I carry a rural mail route out of Spencer, in the northwest corner of Iowa.

My route is a hundred and twelve miles of gravel and blacktop, mostly corn and beans, a few hog confinements, a few old farmsteads where the same families have taken the mail for four generations.

I know who gets their checks on the third. I know who is waiting on test results. I know whose dog will bite and whose dog will only act like it.

My husband works road construction. That September his crew was paving a stretch of four-lane three hours south, trying to finish before the cold set in, and he was staying in a motel down there through the week.

He came home Saturday nights when he could and left again before light on Monday. That is the life, and we are grateful for the work. But it meant I was the one at the fair.

Dawna is married to my husband’s brother. They live outside town on his family’s old place. He farms some and hauls grain for the co-op in the fall, and she has run the lemonade stand at the fair for eleven years.

It is a good stand, I will say that. A wooden booth on the midway with a striped awning, real lemons squeezed by hand, cane sugar, crushed ice. People come back to it every year.

Back in August, at Sunday dinner at my in-laws’, Dawna said her usual help had moved to Ames for college and she was short a pair of hands for the fair.

Rylan said he would do it. He said it before anybody else could say anything. He had been saving for a truck since he was eleven years old.

“I’ll pay you ten dollars an hour,” Dawna told him, right there with the green bean casserole going around. “That’s more than the fair pays the high school kids picking up trash.”

Rylan grinned so wide I could see his back teeth. My father-in-law reached over and shook his hand like they were closing on a section of ground.

The Truck

The truck was a 2006 Ford Ranger, regular cab, two-wheel drive, with a hundred and ninety thousand miles and a tailgate that only opened from the outside.

It belonged to a retired farmer on my route who had parked it behind his machine shed when he bought a newer one. He told Rylan he would hold it till spring for thirty-eight hundred dollars.

Rylan had twenty-six hundred in his savings account. He had earned every dollar detasseling corn in July, mowing for three widows on my route, and walking beans for a neighbor when he was too young to do anything else.

With the fair money he would have been within a hundred dollars. He had it figured on a sheet of notebook paper taped inside his closet door, with the truck’s picture cut out of the sale bill.

So when he worked Dawna’s stand, he worked it like it was his own.

Nine Days

The fair runs eight days, Saturday to Saturday. Dawna had Rylan come out the Thursday and Friday before it opened to get the stand ready.

He scrubbed that booth top to bottom with bleach water. He hauled fifty-pound bags of sugar from her pickup, eight of them. He helped set up the coolers and string the lights along the awning.

Then the gates opened, and from ten in the morning until the midway closed, he squeezed lemons. There is a lever press, but on busy days they did it by hand too, cutting and twisting, cutting and twisting.

I worked my route those days and drove out to the fairgrounds after. I brought him a sandwich at supper and sat on a bench across the way and watched him work.

He was good at it. He was polite to everybody. He called the old men sir and the old women ma’am, and he made the little kids laugh by flipping a lemon and catching it behind his back.

I kept his hours in the back of the little notebook I use on my route for holds and forwards. I did not do it because I did not trust Dawna. I did it because that is how I keep anything that matters.

Two setup days at eight hours each. Seven fair days, most of them thirteen and fourteen hours long. On the last page I added it up twice.

A hundred and ten hours. Eleven hundred dollars.

On the seventh day of the fair, that Friday, he asked her for it. And she said what she said.