The Boy and the Glass Hive

Gwen had already set Trudy Bell’s candle table on my son’s corner by the time I got back from the coffee stand.

I stood there holding two paper cups and looked at it. Folding table, white cloth, forty soy candles in mason jars lined up like little soldiers. Right where the card table had been.

Dustin’s card table was twenty feet away now, shoved up against the back of the gazebo lot with one leg sunk in the grass. His six totes of honey sat on the pavement beside it. Somebody had set them down hard.

It was ten after seven on the first Saturday in September, and the Pike Run Farmers Market did not open until eight.

My son was thirteen years old. He had been standing in that corner since 6:45, and he had done everything right. He had wiped each jar with a damp rag. He had stacked them in rows of twelve. He had taped down the corner of his tablecloth against the wind.

He was standing very straight with his hands in the pockets of his green sweatshirt, looking at his jars and not at anybody.

“Mom,” he said when I walked up. “It’s fine.”

It was not fine. I could tell it was not fine because he said it before I had asked him anything.

“What happened?”

“Aunt Gwen said Trudy needed the corner. For candle season.” He shrugged one shoulder, the way his father does. “She said the gazebo lot was just as good.”

I looked at the gazebo lot. It was a strip of cracked asphalt behind the white gazebo, past the porta-johns, next to the dumpster the Lions Club uses for their pancake supper. Nobody walks back there unless they are lost.

The corner by the bank was where every shopper in Pike Run, Ohio, entered the market. Everyone who came off Main Street walked right past it. Dustin had held that spot every Saturday since the second week of May.

I set the coffee cups on the table. Then I walked across the square to my sister-in-law.

Gwen Rhodes is my husband’s older sister, and she has managed our market for six years. The village pays her a stipend of four hundred dollars a month to do it, and she wears the job like a uniform. She carries a clipboard. She wears a lanyard. She keeps the map of who stands where, and nobody has ever argued with the map.

She was standing near the bank with Trudy, pointing at the pavement as if arranging furniture.

“Gwen.”

“Dana, good morning.” She did not turn around all the way. “I know what you’re going to say. I sent Dustin a text on Thursday and he didn’t answer.”

“Dustin doesn’t have a phone.”

“Well, I texted you.”

I checked my phone. She had. Thursday at 9:52 at night, when I was asleep, because I carry mail on a rural route and my alarm goes off at 4:30. The text said, Need to shift a few spots Sat, will explain. That was all.

“That’s not a notice,” I said. “That’s a heads up at ten o’clock at night.”

“It’s a market, Dana. Spots move.” She tapped her clipboard. “Trudy has a real display and she’s local to the square. Candle season starts now. People want candles. The corner brings foot traffic, and a card table of honey jars doesn’t have a presence.”

“He has sold thirty jars a Saturday off that corner since May.”