The Candle Table in the Feed Lot

Then the farm trucks, coming slow with their windows down, looking at the tables like men inspecting a neighbor’s corn. Across the street, the hall’s lot stayed empty. Somewhere in there, a harp kept going.

I sold eleven pairs in the first twenty minutes. I do not mean to brag. I only want you to understand how it felt, because I had braced myself all week for a quiet table. I had pictured myself alone in a cold lot with ninety-four pairs of candles and a feed sack sign, waving at pickups that did not stop.

Instead, a woman I had never met bought three pairs for her Christmas table and said, “These smell like my mother’s house.” A man in a blaze orange cap, who had stayed home with a bad hip, bought one pair for his wife and one pair, he said, to keep the first one company.

A girl of maybe sixteen, with her mother beside her, bought two pairs and asked if she could take a picture of Lainey’s sign.

Around nine-thirty, an old man in a plaid coat came slowly across the lot, leaning on a cane, and stopped at the end of my table.

I knew him. Everybody knows Harold Nyberg. He is eighty-one and has lived on County Road K his whole life, and his wife, Marie, passed away in February after fifty-eight years of marriage. For eight years she bought a pair of my tapers at the fair, every time, and paid in exact change from a little coin purse.

“Kelsey.”

“Harold. I’m so glad you came.” He stood there a long while and looked at the tapers. His hand shook a little on the cane. Lainey, who had been selling at the end of the table with a quarter in each pocket, went quiet and still.

“Marie always got the honey-colored ones,” he said. “I know she did.”

“I don’t know why I came. I haven’t bought a thing since she went. There’s nothing in that house I want.” He cleared his throat. “I just thought, it’s the fair, and it’s Saturday. She always said Saturday was hers.”

Lainey stepped forward. I had not told her to. She is nine years old, and she picked up the nicest pair of honey-gold tapers on the table, the ones with the straightest lines, and held them out with both hands.

“These are for you,” she said. “You don’t have to pay. They’re from Marie.” Harold looked at her. He looked at me. “Lainey, honey, he should pay,” I started, but Harold was already shaking his head.

“No. I’ll pay. Marie never took a thing she didn’t pay for.”

He took out a coin purse. It was hers, small and brown and worn at the clasp, and his big thumb did not quite fit the latch. He counted out twelve dollars in ones and pressed them into Lainey’s hand.

“I’m going to put them on the kitchen table,” he said, “and light one at supper. So the house has company.”

“Yes sir,” Lainey said. She did not cry. She is, as I said, a very careful child. But she looked at me over his shoulder, and I looked back at her, and neither of us could say anything at all.