The Candle Table in the Feed Lot

We were set up by 6:40. Glen had dragged a pallet of salt blocks to the front of the lot for a riser, with a sheet of plywood over two sawhorses behind it. He had put out three orange cones, which nobody needed. I think he wanted me to feel official.

I stacked the tapers in straight rows on the plywood, honey-gold on the left, cream on the right, the little short ones in a wicker basket in the middle. Lainey wanted a job, so I told her she could write the prices, and she took a marker and a clean feed sack from Glen’s stack and went to work.

She printed it in her very best letters. Candles, twelve dollars a pair. Hand dipped. Honeybees made the wax. Single taper, six dollars.

“Do the bees need to be on the sign?” I asked.

“People like to know where it came from,” she said, and she drew a bee next to it, a fat yellow one with stripes.

Across Main Street, the hall doors were propped open with a brick, and I could see all the way in. White tablecloths on every table. Little wooden crates. A chalkboard on an easel with a flower painted on it. A woman in a long cardigan sat on a stool at the far end with a harp.

A harp. At a deer widow fair, in Pine Creek, on opening day. The sound of it came out the door and across the street and landed on a parking lot that was, at that moment, completely empty. It was lovely. It was also the saddest thing I had ever heard.

“Is that a guitar?” Gage asked. “It’s a harp.”

“Who’s it for?” I did not have an answer for that, either.

At 7:55 a green pickup came rattling into the lot. It was Arlene Halvorsen, seventy-eight years old, in a quilted coat and her late husband’s barn cap, with a banker’s box on her hip and a lawn chair in her other hand.

She set the box on the plywood as if it had been planned all along. “Glen called me. Where do you want me?”

“Arlene. You don’t have to.” “My jam doesn’t look curated?” She had a dry little smile. “I wasn’t curated this year either. Seems we’re in the same boat. Where do you want me?”

“Next to the candles.” “Good. Your candles smell better than a hall full of strangers.”

She unfolded her chair. She took out eighteen jars of rhubarb jam and six of strawberry-rhubarb and lined them up like soldiers. Then she sat down, folded her hands, and looked at the empty street like a woman waiting on a bus she knew was coming.

“Uff da,” she said, to no one. “That is a lot of cones.”

Then they came. Delores Dufek in her station wagon, with the dishcloths she knits in stripes. The Bjork twins with their chainsaw-carved bears. Arnold Bjork’s wife, Marlys, with six dozen caramel rolls in aluminum pans, who has never once sold out before ten. A couple from the next county with homemade bird feeders.

By 8:30 there were sixteen tables in a parking lot, and Betty Kessler had a roaster of brats going on a salt block beside a cooler of cider. Glen zipped Gage into an orange vest that came down to his knees and put him on the curb to wave cars in.

Gage took it more seriously than anything he has ever done. He stood on that curb with one hand up like a crossing guard, and every truck coming down Main Street slowed and waved back.