The fryers did not click off. They just stopped humming, the way a refrigerator does in the night, and you only notice the sound because it is suddenly gone.
Lacey noticed first. She was standing at the service window counting quarters into the cash box, and she looked up at me with her mouth half open, like she had missed a step on the stairs.
“Mama,” she said. “The light went out.”
It was a quarter to eleven on opening day of the Darcy County Fair. The gates had been open fifteen minutes. The midway smelled like fresh sawdust, lemon shake-ups and somebody’s diesel generator warming up behind the Tilt-A-Whirl.
I wiped my hands on my apron and stepped down out of the trailer. The August sun hit me like an oven door. Somewhere over by the show barns a loudspeaker was calling the junior beef class to the ring.
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My cousin Trent was standing at the power pole ten feet from my hitch. He had my orange cord in one hand, the plug end swinging. In his other hand he had two black cords that were not mine.
I watched him push the black cords into the outlets where my plug had been. Then he let my cord drop. It swung once against the post and hung there, loose, the brass prongs catching the sun.
“Trent,” I said. “What are you doing?”
He did not look at me right away. He looked across the midway, where a taco stand with a fresh green awning was parked in the gap between the funnel cakes and the ring toss. A woman was standing in its window, watching us.
“Spot’s Kayla’s now, Jo,” he said. “Grounds crew call. You’ll want to pull out after close tonight so she can move in.”
The Spot
I have to tell you about that spot, so you understand.
My grandpa sold corn dogs from that same patch of midway for thirty-one summers. He had a plywood stand back then, painted white, with a hand-lettered sign and a fry pot he bought from a church that was closing its kitchen.
When he got too old to stand in the heat, my mother took it over. When her knees gave out, it came to me. Six summers ago I bought a used white trailer with two electric fryers, a little reach-in cooler and a service window, and I parked it right where his plywood stand had been.
That trailer pays our bills. I want to be plain about that. I work at the elevator office in the off season, answering phones and running scale tickets, but the fair circuit is where the real money comes from.
I do six fairs a summer, starting in June and finishing in September. The Darcy County Fair is my best week. It always has been, because it is home, and because people here remember my grandpa’s corn dogs and come back for them.
Lacey’s dad left when she was four. I do not say that to make anybody feel sorry for me. I say it because when I tell you that trailer is how I keep her in school shoes and the lights on, I mean exactly that.
Lacey is twelve now. She has worked the window since she was nine, standing on a milk crate so she could reach. This summer she did not need the crate anymore, and she was prouder of that than anything.
The spot rent for the week was $450. It always has been due in cash at the fair office by close on opening day. Mina at the office writes you a receipt by hand in a carbon book, the same way it was done when Grandpa paid it.
I had not paid it yet. Nobody pays it before they sell anything. You pay it out of the first day’s money, and everybody knows that, including Trent.