The Combine Across the Street

Hallie took the bar in both hands. “Why’d you save it?” she asked. “Because you like those,” Owen said. “And you’re my cousin.”

Hallie looked at the bar for a long time.

Then she put it in her bucket, very carefully, on top. She stepped forward in her puffy coat and her plastic crown and hugged the front of the cardboard combine, which was as far around as she could reach.

“I like your reel,” she said into the green paint. “Thank you.” “Mom said you weren’t allowed.”

“I know,” Owen said. “But I got a better place.” I looked across Elm Street.

Amber had come out from behind her clipboard. She was looking at her daughter.

Hallie was hugging a cardboard combine in front of three hundred people. Amber did not cross the street. She did not wave. She did not call out.

She stood there. I saw her mouth open once, as if to say a name, and then close.

I will tell you the truth. I wanted to feel good. I wanted that picture to feel like victory. What I felt was closer to sorrow, because I knew her father had run a combine for forty years, and I knew she knew what that costume meant.

She just did not know how to take it back. At 4:30, Zach’s counter read 290, and the line was down to the stragglers.

I want to tell you about the last one.

She was four, maybe five, and she stood at the edge of the bank lot with a white bedsheet over her head and two holes cut out for eyes. It was a ghost, the kind we all made when we were small, and it came down to the pavement on one side and not on the other.

She did not have a bucket. She had a plastic grocery sack.

Her mother stood a long way back by the sawhorses, a young woman in a Marlow Foods apron, with her arms folded tight across her chest. She was not coming closer.

The little ghost looked up at the combine. “Is this for real?” she said.

“Yeah,” said Owen. “Even for me?” “For everybody.” “I didn’t sign up.” “That’s okay,” Owen said gently. “Neither did I.”

He looked into the wagon. There were three bars left in the corner, and one more that he took out of his own jacket pocket, a candy bar he had kept all afternoon for himself, which I had not known about.

He held out all four. “You can have these,” he said. “There’s plenty.” The ghost took them. Her small hands came out from under the sheet like a bird’s feet.

She did not say thank you. She looked at the bars, and the combine, and Owen’s face, and then she turned and walked all the way across the bank lot to her mother and held up the sack.

Her mother crouched down. I saw her say something. I saw her press her lips together.