The Candle Table in the Feed Lot

The envelope came back on a Tuesday in the middle of September, and I knew what was inside it before I opened it, because it was thin.

I had mailed my booth check to Natalie three weeks earlier, the way I had mailed one to the Community Hall every September for eight years. Thirty-five dollars, folded in thirds, with my name and the word candles on a sticky note.

Now there it was again, my own check, with a note paper-clipped to the front in my sister-in-law’s tidy slanted hand.

“Thank you for your years. This year’s market is curated, and candles are a little too country for the direction. Best, Natalie.”

I read it standing at the mailbox at the end of our gravel drive, a feed store calendar under my arm and the wind pushing maple leaves across the road. I read it twice. The second time I only read two words. Too country.

I live in Pine Creek, Wisconsin. Eleven hundred people, one stoplight, a feed store, a hall, two churches, and a bar that fries fish on Friday. I could not think what else country was supposed to be.

I put the note in my back pocket and walked up the drive. I did not tear it up. I want to say that at the start, because I thought about it.

Our kitchen smelled the way it always smells in September, like a honey jar left open in the sun. I keep fourteen beehives in the back field. Every fall I melt the cappings and old comb in a double boiler on the stove, and then I dip candles.

Hand-dipped tapers, thirty dips each, into wax held near a hundred and sixty degrees, with a cotton wick I braid myself and a stick of cedar to hang them from. A pair takes about forty minutes from the first dip to the last.

I sell them for twelve dollars a pair. They burn slow, they smell like a warm field, and they do not drip. For eight years, one Saturday a year, they were the whole reason my kids had school clothes.

That Saturday is the one our town calls the deer widow fair.

If you did not grow up in Wisconsin, here is how it works. The gun deer season opens the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Every man in town who owns a rifle and a blaze orange coat goes north to camp for nine days, and the women stay home with the kids and the dogs and the furnace.

So towns give the women something to do. Ours is a craft fair at the Community Hall, thirty years running, with a church ladies’ pie table, a dinner in the basement, and booths down both sides of the big room.

Jeff’s grandmother, Loretta, started it with eleven card tables the winter the sawmill closed. By last year it had thirty-eight booths and a line out the door by nine in the morning.

Lainey was at the kitchen table doing her spelling words. She is nine, with Jeff’s long jaw and my freckles, and she notices everything.

“Mom, who’s the letter from?” “Aunt Natalie.” “Is it about the fair?”

“It’s about my booth,” I said. “I’ll tell you tonight.”

She looked at me for a second, and then she went back to the word necessary, which she spelled with two c’s. That is how I knew she had read my face. She is a kind child. She lets a lie go by if she thinks it is for her own good.