The Candle Table in the Feed Lot

I did not cry. I did something worse, which was arithmetic. Last year my table took in eleven hundred and ninety dollars in one Saturday. Take out the thirty-five-dollar booth fee, the wax and the wicks, and it came to just over nine hundred.

That bought Lainey’s winter boots and two pairs of jeans, Gage’s snow pants, and the dentist’s co-pay in January.

I am not rich, and I never said I was. I work three days a week in the school office, and Jeff is a lineman for the electric co-op. We are fine. We are fine because of Saturdays like that one.

My friend Denise at the school office asked me the next day, the way you would, “Why don’t you just go to the church board? Or say something at the meeting?”

I told her the hall was rented in Natalie’s name. The board had signed off on her plan in June, and half of them sat on her committee. And the woman who started the fair, Grandma Loretta, had been gone three winters, and I was not going to stand up in her church kitchen and turn her fair into a family feud over twelve-dollar candles.

If I made it a fight, Jeff’s whole family would have to pick a side at Thanksgiving. His father, Ron, is seventy-one and does not like to pick. So I did the thing I know how to do. I got quiet, and I went back to work.

Jeff came home that night and read the note at the kitchen table with his boots still on. He is a big, slow-talking man. He does not raise his voice, but when he is angry his ears go red, and they were the color of a stop sign.

“She sent this to you?” “She sent it with my check.”

“She did not ask me.” “She doesn’t need to, honey. It’s her committee.”

He took his phone out onto the porch. I watched him through the window, pacing the boards with one hand on the back of his neck. He called her twice. The first time they talked about four minutes, and he came in with his jaw set. The second time, she hung up on him.

He stood in the doorway for a while. “I’ll skip camp,” he said. “I’ll be at that hall Saturday, and I’ll say it to her face.”

I looked at him. Eleven months he had waited for that week. His dad had a stand on the north ridge of the family land near Phillips, and Ron’s knees were not what they used to be, and every year Jeff walked him in on the dark trail with a flashlight.

“No,” I said. “Go. If you stay, it’s your fight with your sister, and it won’t be about a table of candles anymore. Let me handle this one.”

“How?” “I haven’t figured it out yet.”

He did not like that. But he is a good husband, and he knows when I mean something. He left Thursday morning with his orange hat on the dash and a thermos between his knees, and he kissed the kids and told me to call if I needed him.

His truck went down the gravel drive. I stood on the porch in the cold with a note in my pocket and ninety-four pairs of candles in the dining room.