The Candle Table in the Feed Lot

Let me tell you about Natalie before I tell you the rest, because she is not a monster, and the rest of this does not make sense if she is.

Natalie Brandt Voss is thirty-eight, three years younger than her brother, my husband. She sells real estate in Medford, forty minutes south. She is quick and well put together, and at eighteen she was the first Brandt to leave Pine Creek for college in Madison.

She came back at thirty-three with a husband, a house on the lake road, and a feeling that the town was smaller than she remembered.

The spring before all this, Grandma Loretta’s fair needed a new chair, because the old chair had retired. Natalie raised her hand. The church board was glad to have her. Nobody else wanted the clipboard.

She called a meeting in the church basement in April. I went, with my coffee and a plate of lemon bars, because I always go. Natalie stood at the front with a laptop and a picture on the screen: a market in Madison, white tents and wooden crates, a man selling sourdough, a girl in a linen apron.

“This is where I want us to go,” she said. “More curated. More boutique. Less church basement.”

I remember the room going quiet. Nine of us in folding chairs, and every one of us had spent a hundred Saturdays in that basement. Arlene Halvorsen, who is seventy-eight and has sold her rhubarb jam there since the first year, said nothing at all. She just folded her paper napkin into smaller and smaller squares.

I should have spoken up then. I did not. I told myself that new energy is not a crime, and that she was Jeff’s sister, and that families give each other room.

That was April. By September, thirty of the thirty-eight old vendors had a letter like mine.

I called her that night, after the kids were in bed, and it went to voicemail. I left a message as kind as I could make it. The next morning, after Jeff left for work, I called again, and this time she picked up.

“Kelsey, hi. I’m in the middle of showing a house.”

“I won’t keep you. I got my check back. I wanted to ask what I did.”

“You didn’t do anything,” she said. “It’s not personal. We had an application process this year, and a jury looked at the vendors.”

“A jury.” “A small committee. Me and two friends from the market in Madison.”

“I never filled out an application. Nobody told me there was one.”

“It was in the email.” “I don’t get the email, Natalie. Nobody over fifty in this town gets that email. We got a flyer, same as always.”

There was a pause on the line, and a door shutting somewhere on her side.

“I’m not going to argue,” she said. “The decision is final. The booth fee is eighty-five dollars this year, and it’s juried. Honestly, Kelsey, beeswax candles in a church basement? It looks like 1985. I’m trying to make this something people drive here for.”

“Eighty-five dollars.” “For the amenities.” “What amenities?”

“I have to go. I’m sorry. I really do have to go.” She hung up. I stood in the kitchen with the phone in my hand and wax cooling in the double boiler on the stove, going cloudy at the edges.