The Aunt Who Pulled Emmys Project

“That I can do,” he said. “I’ve had a lot of practice.”

That made me laugh for the first time all day, and then, because I was so tired, it made me cry a little too. He let me do it, in Nevada, with the phone on his dashboard, until I stopped.

On Monday I took a long lunch and drove Emmy to the county extension office, which sits in a low brick building next to the fairgrounds, behind a row of cottonwoods that had gone yellow.

Glenn Dunning has been the extension agent in our county for nineteen years, a big, slow-spoken man in a tan canvas jacket who knows every dairyman and potato grower in the valley by his first name and his acreage.

He had been at the fair on Saturday, working the information table at the far end of the gym. He had not been at Emmy’s end.

“I heard about it,” he said before we sat down. “I’m sorry, young lady. I heard it from three different people, and none of them could say why.”

Emmy put the notebook on his desk and opened it to the first page and did not say anything. I have never been so proud of her silence.

Glenn read for a long time, turning the pages with one thick finger. He held the map up to the window and counted the pins with his lips moving. He stopped at the blank control and said, “Distilled water from the drugstore. Good.” Then he sat back and took off his glasses.

“Emmy, who taught you to run a control?”

“The kit had a sheet,” she said. “And Mr. Hayes in science said you have to have something that should read zero, or you can’t trust the rest.”

“Can a kid speak?”

“There’s no age on the sign-in sheet.” He looked at Emmy. “But they will ask her the hard questions. How she knows. Who helped. And she has to answer in her own words, because the minute it sounds like a script, it’s over.

I can’t vouch for strips I didn’t dip. I can only tell the board afterward that the numbers hold up as screening, and that a lab ought to confirm. Can you do that, Emmy?”

My daughter thought about it for what felt like a full minute. A tractor started up somewhere behind the building.

“What if they don’t believe me?” she said.

“Then you will have told them anyway,” said Glenn Dunning. “And they will have to decide what to do about knowing.”

I had already called the fair chairwoman, Twyla Ellison, on Saturday night. She said judges’ decisions are final and the fair board would not meet until January.

After that I did not call the school, or the woman I went to high school with who writes for the newspaper. I have a rule, and it is not a noble one. I do not like to win through somebody who is paid to win. People believe what they watch happen. They do not believe a letter.

That evening Emmy and I sat at the kitchen table and built her three minutes. I did not write a single word of it. I told her to say it the way she would say it to Wilbur. She wrote on an index card and crossed out and read it aloud to the dog.