She had taught Glenda to roll the dough in the cinnamon sugar when Glenda was five. Glenda still measures the cinnamon sugar with her palm cupped, the way Lorraine showed her.
That is something I did not say at the supper table. It was all in the room, though, behind Wayne’s laugh. I think Ben and I both felt it.
At six-thirty, I filled the big orange cooler with hot cider, a dozen quarts I had heated on the stove, stirred with cinnamon sticks and a little orange peel.
I loaded the table into the back of the truck, along with a folding chair for me and a stack of foam cups. The cooler was too heavy for her to lift, so Ben showed her how to set it on the table and lean on the spigot with both hands.
She wore her puffy teal coat and her red braids hung down over the collar. When she leaned into that spigot with both hands she looked about six.
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“Is it supposed to be this cold?” she asked.
“It’s the first Saturday of October,” I said. “This is nothing. It’ll be colder by Thanksgiving.”
“Good,” Glenda said. “Cattlemen will want it hot.”
By seven the stock trailers were lining up. There is a sound a sale barn makes before sale time, trailer gates rattling and cattle calling to each other across the pens, and a smell of hay and diesel and manure that no candle company has ever managed to bottle.
I stood behind the stand with my hands in my brown barn jacket and tried to look like I belonged to the business and not the child.
The first man to stop was a young hand in a John Deere cap, hauling a load of steers. He eyed the cooler, eyed the cookies, and eyed Glenda.
“How much?”
“A dollar for the cider,” Glenda said. “Cookies are free if you want one. The money’s for the church roof.”
He gave her a dollar. He took the cider. He took a cookie, and a second one for the road. Then he put another dollar in the can, and looked embarrassed, and left.
That was the whole first hour. Eight dollars and a lot of men looking at a girl in a teal coat as though she had asked them to take a final exam.
By ten o’clock the sale was underway and the auctioneer’s chant came rolling out of the open barn doors, hundreds of numbers flying so fast you could not catch one of them. Most of the trade went inside.
She poured her last cup at noon. We counted the can at the tailgate. Sixty-four dollars.
She was thrilled. She held the bills in her fist as though she had landed a fish.
“Mom, that’s sixty-four dollars for the roof.”
“It is,” I said.
Wayne heard the number by Monday. Gene’s wife told the feed store clerk, and the clerk told half the county, and Wayne said, to the room, that he had called it.
I heard about it from Ben that night. Ben didn’t say much. He rubbed the back of his neck and said, “He’s still grieving, Kristine.”
“Three years,” I said.
“Some people take longer.”
I looked at my husband. He and Wayne have the same hands, long and chapped, with the same crooked left thumb from the same barn door. I knew he was not defending Wayne. He was grieving too, for the brother he used to have.