The Lemonade Stand Across the Midway

Dawna’s Reasons

I want to be fair to Dawna here, because it matters to how this ended.

I found out later what was going on with her. Sugar had gone up something terrible that year, and so had cups and lids and lemons, and she had kept her price at three dollars a cup because she said people would quit coming if she raised it.

She had barely broken even all week. Her mortgage was two months behind. She had not told her husband how far behind, and she had not told anyone else at all.

So I understand that she was scared. I understand that she looked at a fourteen-year-old’s eleven hundred dollars and saw her house.

But I will say this plainly, the way my mother would have. You do not make up your own trouble out of a child’s wages. Not your nephew’s, not anybody’s. There is no version of that which is right.

Saturday Morning

Saturday morning at seven my phone rang. I was standing at the kitchen counter in my socks.

“Kendra, this is Marvella Quist,” the voice said. “I want you to bring that boy to the fairgrounds by eight.”

Marvella Quist is seventy-six years old. She led 4-H in Clay County for thirty years. She taught Rylan how to show a market lamb when he was nine, and she taught me how to sew a straight seam when I was ten.

Her husband Merle ran a concession trailer at the fair for forty-one summers. Lemonade and pork tenderloins, the tenderloins as big as a hubcap. He died in February, in his own bed, with Marvella holding his hand.

“I heard about Dawna,” she said.

“How did you hear?”

“Honey, it’s the fair,” she said. “Half the 4-H mothers heard it by supper. The old girls in the dining hall heard it by dark.”

She cleared her throat.

“Merle’s trailer is still sitting on its spot on the midway. I paid the fair board for the space back in April, out of habit, before I had any sense. I’ve driven past it every day this week and I couldn’t make myself open the shutters.”

“Marvella,” I said.

“It’s got a working sink and a cooler and a lemon press Merle built himself,” she said. “I’ve got a case of cups in my garage. You bring the boy. Merle would want somebody in there before the fair’s over, and I’d want it to be someone who works like that.”

I stood in my kitchen with the phone to my ear and could not get a word out.

“Kendra? Did I lose you?”

“No, ma’am,” I said. “We’ll be there.”