Trent Comes Over
Hank did not shout. Hank has never shouted that I have heard. He just raised one hand and crooked a finger, the way my grandpa used to call the dog in.
Trent came. It took him a long time to walk twenty yards.
“Trent,” Hank said. “Did you pull this lady’s plug?”
Trent looked at the ground. Then he looked at Kayla’s stand. Then he looked back at Hank.
“Kayla needed a better spot,” he said. “Josie’s got a following. I figured she’d be fine anywhere.”
Get a new story in your inbox every morning.
Facebook doesn’t show you every story we post. Our free newsletter does. Join 2,500+ readers.
“You figured,” Hank said. “Did the board move her?”
“No, sir.”
“Did I move her?”
“No, sir.”
“Did she pay her rent on this spot?”
Trent glanced at me. “She hasn’t paid yet.”
Hank looked at him a long moment. “Nobody pays before they sell, son. You know that. You’ve walked rent money up to that office yourself.”
Trent did not say anything to that.
“Plug her back in,” Hank said. “Right now. And then you take Miss Mott’s cords back across that midway, and you help her move to the spot the board gave her. Today. Before supper.”
In Front of the Line
There is no easy way to do what Trent had to do next, and I will say this for him, he did not try to make it easy.
He walked to the power pole in front of thirty people. He pulled Kayla’s two black cords out of the outlets. He picked up my orange cord, and he plugged it back in where it belonged.
Inside the trailer, the fryers hummed back on. The little red light on the cooler blinked. Lacey let out a breath I think she had been holding since a quarter to eleven.
Nobody in line clapped. I was glad they did not. It was not a thing to clap for. It was a man fixing something he had broken, and everybody standing there knew it.
Then Trent bent down and started pulling up the orange tape that held Kayla’s cords to the midway. He coiled each cord over his elbow the way my grandpa taught both of us, over and under so it would not kink.
He carried them across the midway one at a time. It took him two trips. They were heavy, and it was ninety-one degrees, and he was sweating through his grounds crew shirt by the second one.
I watched Kayla when he got to her stand. She said something to him, short, and he answered. I could not hear them. She did not look happy, but she did not look at me, either.