The Lemonade Stand Across the Midway

Getting Ready

We scrubbed. Rylan knew how now. He had done it for his aunt the week before, and his hands knew the work without his head having to think about it.

The county inspector was a heavy, kind young woman with a clipboard. A man from the fair board walked her over and stood by while she checked the water heater and the sink and the thermometer in the cooler.

“Merle kept this thing nicer than my kitchen,” she said, and signed her sheet. The fair board man nodded at Rylan and walked away without another word.

Then Rylan needed a sign. Marvella had a can of blue paint in her trunk, the same paint Merle used to touch up the trailer every June, and a plank of sanded pine from her garage.

Rylan propped the plank on a sawhorse in the sun. Then, in careful blue letters, he painted Rylan’s Fresh Squeezed. It took him four tries to get the apostrophe where he wanted it.

He hung it above the service window with two wire hooks Marvella found in a coffee can.

“What are you going to charge?” Marvella asked him.

“Three dollars,” Rylan said. “Same as Aunt Dawna.”

“You could charge two and empty her line,” Marvella said. She was watching him over her glasses. She was testing him and we both knew it.

“No, ma’am,” Rylan said. “I don’t want to hurt her stand. I just want to sell some lemonade.”

Marvella looked at me then, and I saw her eyes go wet behind her glasses, and she looked away quick toward the Ferris wheel.

“That’s Merle’s answer,” she said. “That’s exactly the answer he would have given.”

Across the Way

Dawna came out to open her stand at a quarter to ten. I watched her see the trailer.

She stopped with her keys in her hand. She read the sign. She looked at Rylan in the service window, and then she looked at me.

I did not wave. I did not smile at her the wrong way, either. I nodded once, the way you would nod at a neighbor across a church parking lot, and I went back to cutting lemons.

She turned her back and unlocked her booth.

I will not pretend it did not feel like something, standing in that trailer with my son. But I can tell you honestly what I felt most was tired, and sad, and proud, all at the same time, and none of it felt like winning.

The First Customer

At ten o’clock Rylan propped the window all the way open and set out the jar for tips.

The first customer was an old farmer from north of town. I will not put his name down here, because he would not want it. He had bought lemonade from Merle Quist every fair for thirty years.

He walked up slow, with his cane, and looked at the trailer a long time before he looked at Rylan.

“Merle’s,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” Rylan said. “Mrs. Quist is letting me use it.”

“Two,” the old man said, and put a ten on the counter. “Keep it.”

Rylan squeezed them fresh while he waited, the press going, the juice running into the cup over the sugar, then ice, then water from the cooler, then a lid and a stir.

The old man took a drink of the first one and closed his eyes.

“That’s right,” he said. “That’s how it’s supposed to taste.”

He took the second cup and walked it over to the bench in front of the poultry barn, where his wife was sitting, and he handed it to her, and I watched her look over at the trailer and lift it a little, like a toast.