The Line
I do not know how word gets around a county fair. I have lived in Clay County all my life and I still do not know.
By eleven there were six people in line. By eleven-thirty there were fifteen. I stood beside Rylan with my brown hair in a ponytail and my navy tank top soaked through, squeezing lemons until my hands ached up to the wrist.
Rylan worked the window. He took the money and made the change and talked to every single person who came up.
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By noon the line ran past the corn dog stand.
And I started to notice who was in it.
The old fair hands. The men who had shown cattle at that fair for fifty years. The women who had run the 4-H dining hall since before I was born. The retired ag teacher. The man who calls the hog show.
They came through one after the other, and every one of them bought two cups.
Not one of them said a word about Dawna. Not one. They said “Good to see Merle’s open” and “Smells right in there” and “How’s your mother, Kendra,” and they paid and they walked on.
That was the town speaking. I did not need anybody to make a speech. Those people do not make speeches. They buy two cups.
Marvella
Around noon Marvella came back from the dining hall with a ham sandwich for each of us wrapped in wax paper.
She did not come in the trailer. She stood outside it a long while, in the sun, watching the line.
Then she reached up and laid her palm flat against the side of the trailer, right beside the little blue letters, Merle and Marvella Quist. She left it there, the way you would lay a hand on a horse’s neck to settle him.
Her lips moved. I could not hear it over the midway, but I knew the shape of it. It was the first line of a hymn they sing at our church, the one about the morning.
Rylan saw it too. He stopped making change for a second and just looked at her.
When she took her hand away, she wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist and said, “Well. It’s open, Merle,” to nobody, and went back to her lawn chair.
I had to turn around and squeeze lemons very hard for a minute.