The Lemonade Stand Across the Midway

The Drive Home

Rylan did not cry in front of her. I will be proud of that until I die.

He did not cry walking down the midway, either, past the tractor pull bleachers and the pork producers’ tent and the grandstand, all the way to where I had parked in the grass lot.

He got in my car and buckled his seat belt and stared out the windshield at the Ferris wheel turning slow against the blue sky.

We were about two miles out of town, on the blacktop by the Lutheran cemetery, when it came. He put his face in his hands and cried the way he had not cried since he was a little boy.

I pulled over onto the shoulder. I did not say anything. I put my hand on the back of his neck and left it there.

It did not last long. When he was done, he wiped his face on the hem of his T-shirt and sat up straight.

“I’m not going to say anything to her,” he said. “I’m not going to make a scene at the fair.”

“You don’t have to,” I said.

“It’s her stand,” he said. “Grandma and Grandpa will be there tomorrow. Everybody will be there. I don’t want it to be the fair where we all fought.”

That is when I understood what I could and could not do. There was nothing in writing. There was only a promise at a dinner table. And if I went back and had it out with her, it would be the only thing anybody remembered about Rylan’s fair.

The Phone Call

My husband called that evening from the motel, the way he did every night, while the sun was still up over our bean field and I was taking the wash off the line.

I told him all of it. He was quiet so long I thought the call had dropped.

“She said that,” he said finally. “To him.”

“To him and to me.”

“My brother doesn’t know,” he said. “I’d bet the farm on it. He’s been hauling for the co-op since five every morning. He hasn’t been out to that stand once.”

I believed him. My brother-in-law is a decent man and a quiet one, and Dawna handles the money in that house the way I handle it in ours.

“Take care of our boy,” my husband said. “I’ll talk to my brother Sunday, face to face. I won’t do it over the phone.”

He had a point about the phone. Some things are only right if you say them where a man can see your eyes.

“And Kendra,” he said. “Tell Rylan I’m proud of him for walking away. Tell him I said that exactly.”

I did. Rylan nodded and went out to the shed to sit on the mower. He stayed out there until the sun went down.