The Taco Trailer That Crossed the Street

“Yes.”

“I didn’t want him to lose. I just wanted to cook.”

“I know,” I said.

“I’m going to keep parking at Mr. Haldane’s on Fridays, even though I could park on Main. Is that dumb?”

“No,” Marvin said, from the driver’s seat. His voice was thick. “That’s not dumb at all, honey.”

“I think Clyde would like that,” I said. We drove the rest of the way in the dark.

The next Friday, the sixth of November, was thirty four degrees and clear, with the maple leaves gone off the dealership lawn and the sky a hard blue. There were two hundred and eighty people in the implement lot.

Mallory took the order from every one of them. She did not cut a single corner. Russ’s lunch room was still half empty that Friday. Mr. Hendricks had gone back to his meatloaf on Tuesdays, and on Fridays he came to the implement lot.

I never heard him say a word against either one.

I have thought a good deal about Russ since the vote. I would like to tell you he came by with a pie and a handshake. He did not.

I would like to tell you I had forgiven him, but that is not finished, and I do not want to lie to you.

Here is what I can tell you. On the Saturday after the vote, I went down to the machine shed, where Mallory had left the trailer for the weekend.

She had gone to her friend’s for the night. I let myself in with the key she keeps under the flowerpot.

Inside the trailer, taped to the wall by the hood vent where only she would see it, was a folded eight dollar bill, a five and three ones. It was the first sale she ever made, at the Legion lot on the last Saturday of September.

She had written the date on a strip of masking tape and stuck it right beside her grandmother’s recipe card. And under that, in her round careful handwriting, on a piece of notebook paper, she had written one sentence.

Mom’s tin is open again. I stood there a long time. I did not understand it at first. Then I did.

Mallory had been setting aside a little from every Friday in a red cookie tin on the shelf of the trailer.

She had found a matching one at the thrift store and washed it and set it up beside the flat top, and she had been quietly paying me back all month, a little each Friday, the way I had once put it by.

I opened the lid. There were $1,140 in it, in tens and fives and ones, with a rubber band around the whole roll.

I sat down on the step of the trailer. I put the lid back on, very gently.

Then I did what I had refused to do at the lot, and in the hall, and the night of the vote. I cried the way you cry when a long week finally comes loose, and I did not stop for a good while.

The wind came through the open door of the machine shed, and the dust turned in the light, and the only sound was my own crying.

The county pantry is full. I put the tin back on the shelf in the trailer, next to the recipe card, and I turned out the light.