The Candle Table in the Feed Lot

She stood there. The line behind her shuffled their feet. A man in a blaze orange cap, holding a pair of tapers, cleared his throat politely.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” he said. “I’d like to pay.” Natalie turned and walked back across the street. She did not run, but she did not look back, either.

Here is the part nobody believes when I tell it.

By ten o’clock, the harp had stopped. I saw the woman come out onto the hall steps with her instrument in its case, a thin woman in a long cardigan, wearing the face of someone who has driven two hours for the wrong day.

She looked across the street at the brats and the cider and the sixteen tables in the feed store lot. Then she crossed Main Street with the harp case in one hand. “Excuse me,” she said to Glen, who was pouring coffee. “Is this the real one?”

“Depends who you ask,” Glen said. “Cider?”

She took the cider. Then she bought two pairs of my tapers and a jar of Arlene’s jam, and she stood at the edge of the lot for twenty minutes, drinking cider and listening to Gage call “Ope, careful there!” to every truck that pulled in. She told me later it was the first time all day anyone had smiled at her.

Her name was Brooke, and she sold soap. Two other vendors from the hall came across by eleven, one with a basket of lavender sachets and one with soy candles of her own in little jars with wooden lids. She set up at the end of my table, and I let her. She sold six jars by noon.

There was room for everybody. There always is, if the table is free. At 11:50 I sold my last pair of tapers. A farmer from the next county over, a stranger in a John Deere cap with a face like creased leather, bought the final two.

He said his wife burned my candles every Advent, had run out last year, and had been telling him all fall that she hoped I would be at the fair.

Ninety-four pairs. Eleven hundred and twenty-eight dollars, in one Saturday, in a feed store parking lot at thirty-one degrees. I counted it twice in Gage’s coffee can, with Lainey holding the lid.

“Mom,” Gage said. “We’re rich.” “We are not rich, buddy.”

“We’re a little bit rich.” “We are a little bit rich,” I agreed, and I picked him up, vest and all, and held him against me a minute with my face in his hair.

Glen did not say a word. He took a broom from his office and swept the lot while Betty packed the roaster, and when I came to thank him he held up one hand like a man stopping traffic.

“Not necessary.” “Glen, please. Let me pay you something.”

“I said no.” Then, after a second: “Gage could use boots, though. If you’re buying.” I looked down. Gage was wearing the rubber barn boots he had worn since September, and his big toe had worked a hole through the left one.

We went inside. Glen sold me a pair of insulated boots I knew were sixty-four dollars on the shelf, and he rang them up at forty. When I started to say something, he looked at me, and I stopped. On the way out, Betty pressed a bag of brats into my hands, still warm.