The Lemonade Stand Across the Midway

Dawna’s Side of the Midway

I could see Dawna’s stand the whole time. You could not help it. It was right there, thirty yards off, under the striped awning.

In the morning she had a few people. Folks who did not know, or did not care, or had come to her stand every year and were going to keep coming.

But as the line at Merle’s trailer grew, hers got shorter. By noon there were stretches of five and ten minutes when nobody stood in front of her at all.

She stood behind her counter with her arms crossed. She wiped the counter. She wiped it again. She straightened the cups.

I watched people who knew her walk right past. Not rude. Nobody said anything ugly. They just walked past her to get in our line, and she watched them do it.

I will tell you the honest thing. Part of me had wanted that, the night before, lying awake. And when I saw it, I did not like it as much as I thought I would.

She looked small over there. She looked like a woman watching her own house go.

Sold Out

At ten minutes to two, Rylan reached into the case for another lemon, and there were none.

He stood there with his hand in the empty box. Then he turned it over to be sure. A few seeds fell out.

“That’s it,” he said. “That’s all of them.”

The people in line groaned, but they were good about it. A woman from church patted the counter and said, “You did good, honey,” and the line broke up and drifted off down the midway.

Rylan sat down hard on the little stool in the corner of the trailer. His face was red and wet and his hands were shaking from the work.

I counted the money on the cooler lid. A hundred and forty-one cups at three dollars, and the tips on top of that. Four hundred and twenty-three dollars in the cash box, and a hundred and forty-two more in the tip jar.

“Mom,” Rylan said. “Is that real?”

“It’s real,” I said. “Tobin gets his lemons and sugar paid first, and Mrs. Quist gets her space money back.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Before anything.”

The Cup

Rylan stood up and looked out the service window, across the midway.

I looked too.

Dawna was alone at her counter. Her big glass dispenser was almost full. The cooler behind her was full of lemons she had cut that morning that nobody was going to buy. There was nobody in front of her at all.

She was not wiping the counter anymore. She was just standing there with her hands flat on it.

Rylan looked at her a long time. Then he looked down at the pitcher, where there was still about one cup left of the last batch.

He poured it out. He fit a lid on it and put a straw in. Then he set it on a paper napkin and folded the napkin up around the bottom, the way Marvella had shown him, so it would not drip.

“Mom,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

He stepped down out of the trailer and started walking across the midway toward his aunt, holding that cup in both hands like it was something that might spill.

I did not go with him. I stood in the window of Merle’s trailer and watched him go.