Six Hundred Corn Dogs on Opening Day

Kayla

About an hour later, Kayla walked across the midway by herself.

I braced for it. I figured she was coming over to tell me what she thought of me.

She stopped at the end of my table, away from the line. She was younger than me, and up close she looked tired and a little embarrassed.

“I didn’t know,” she said. “He told me the board had moved me. He said you’d agreed to switch.”

I looked at her for a while. I believed her. I do not know why exactly. Maybe because she had walked over by herself, in front of all those people, when she did not have to.

“Well,” I said. “Now you know.”

She nodded. “I’m sorry about your morning.”

“I had a pretty good morning, all things considered,” I said. Then, because she looked like she needed it, I handed her a corn dog. “Here. You haven’t eaten all day. I can tell.”

She took it. She almost laughed.

She went back to her stand and Trent helped her hitch it up, and by five-thirty she had moved to the far spot down by the pig races. I sent Lacey down there at six with a sack of corn dogs for her and whoever was helping her.

Lacey came back and said Kayla had a line. Not a long one. But a line. I was glad.

The Fair Office

At six o’clock I took the cash box into the trailer and counted. I counted twice, the way my mother taught me, once in each direction.

Then I took four hundred and fifty dollars in fives and ones, wrapped it in a rubber band, and walked it up to the fair office myself.

The office is a little white block building by the main gate, with a window unit air conditioner that drips onto the sidewalk. I have been walking rent money into that office since I was a little girl holding my grandpa’s hand.

Mina was at the counter. She has worked that counter for as long as I can remember. She opened the carbon receipt book and licked her thumb to turn the page, the way she always has.

“Heard you had a day,” she said.

“I had a day,” I said.

She counted the money twice, the same way I had. She wrote out the receipt in her slanted handwriting and tore off my copy and handed it across the counter.

“Paid in full,” she said. “Same spot as always.”

I folded the receipt and put it in my apron pocket. I did not say anything else. I did not need to.

Supper Time

By supper the fryers were hot and the trailer lights were on. The power pole was humming. Everything inside the trailer was exactly as it had been at ten-thirty that morning.

But here is the thing. I did not go back inside.

The line had gotten used to the burners. People liked watching. Kids stood at the end of the steel table with their chins on their hands, watching the corn dogs go into the oil and come out gold.

The steam came up and the smell came up and everybody who walked by turned their head. It was the best advertising I have ever had, and it cost me nothing but a sore back.

So I kept frying on the burners. Lacey went inside the trailer and fried in the electric fryers too, and passed them out the window, and we ran both at once for the rest of the evening.

An older man in overalls stopped at the table. He looked at the burners and the pot and the bucket of sand.

“Your granddad had a sand bucket,” he said. “Right there. Same spot.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “He did.”

He paid for four corn dogs and told me to keep the change from a twenty.