The pie judge’s wife slapped her hand on my grandson’s lemonade counter and called me a thieving old woman in front of the whole line, over a $40,000 scratch-off somebody left by the cup stack. “Hand it over or I’ll have you walked off these fairgrounds,” she said. I put it in my apron, and then a fifteen-year-old told me something.
Every quarter in that cashbox was going toward a used trumpet Grayson had picked out at the pawn shop back in March.
He’s ten. He’d been running the stand at the Pulaski County Fair for three summers, off my late husband’s card table.
And he logged every single sale in a green spiral notebook.
The time, how many cups, what they paid with, and one thing about the person so he’d remember them.
“Lady in purple hat, paid in dimes.” That kind of thing.
He picked it up from sitting with me while I did the books at the church office.
The scratch-off turned up at ten after three, once the crowd from the tractor pull thinned out.
Grayson lifted the cup stack to refill it and there it was, already scratched, folded once down the middle.
He read it out loud like a joke.
Then he read it again and quit laughing.
I put my reading glasses on and checked the corner box three times.
Forty thousand dollars.
“Grandma, is that real?” Grayson said.
“If it is, it isn’t ours,” I said. “Whoever dropped it is going to come back for it.”
I folded it into the front pocket of my apron and wrote “Lose something? Ask here” on a paper plate.
About twenty-five minutes later Viola Pemberton came across the grass with a blue ribbon pinned to her blouse.
Everybody in this county knows Viola.
Her husband Marvin has judged the pie tent for twenty-two years, and she makes sure nobody forgets it for one minute.
She didn’t get in line.
She walked right past a mother with twins in a wagon and leaned over the table.
“Marvin left a ticket here this morning,” she said. “I’ll take it.”
“What kind of ticket?” I said.
“Don’t play stupid with me, Lorrie. A scratcher. He bought two lemonades and set it down and forgot it.”
Grayson looked at me.
He had the notebook open on his knee.
“We didn’t open till noon,” he said.
She never even looked at him.
“I know exactly what’s in that apron,” she said. “I watched you put it there from the quilt barn.”
Then she raised her voice so the line could hear her.
“This woman is STEALING from my husband. A grown woman. Using a little boy’s stand to do it.”
A man in a Packers jersey kept working on a turkey leg through the whole thing and never once quit chewing.
Somebody behind him had a phone up.
“If it’s Marvin’s, Marvin can walk over here and tell me what’s on it,” I said.
“My husband does not come running to a lemonade table.”
She said lemonade like she’d stepped in it.
“Then I’ll hold it for him,” I said.
“Oh, you’ll hold it,” she said. “Women like you always hold things. Right up until they’re in your bank account.”
She turned around and went to find the fair board.
Grayson’s ears had gone red.
“Did we do something bad?” he said.
“No, honey,” I said.
That’s when Julianna came over from the ride booth beside us.
She’s fifteen, she sells the wristbands for the Scrambler, and she’d been watching us all afternoon from behind her plexiglass.
She kept both hands jammed in her hoodie pocket.
“Mrs. Lorrie, can I tell you something?” she said. “But you can’t ever say it came from me.”
“All right.”
“Promise.”
“I promise,” I said.
She leaned in close and told me.
It took her maybe thirty seconds.
Then she walked back to her booth and didn’t look our way again.
I stood there with my hand flat over the apron pocket.
I didn’t say one word to Grayson.
At ten after four Viola came back with Fred Tedesco from the fair board, and Marvin trailed a few steps behind holding his judging clipboard against his chest.
Marvin didn’t look at me once.
He looked at the cups.
“Lorrie, let’s keep this friendly,” Fred said. “Viola says the ticket belongs to her household.”
“Then Marvin can say so,” I said.
Marvin cleared his throat. “Vi, let’s let the office sort it out.”
“NO,” Viola said. “She hands it to ME. Right now. In front of everybody.”
She shoved her palm out over the table, inches from Grayson’s face.
“I’m not asking you again, you old thief. GIVE ME MY HUSBAND’S TICKET.”
Grayson pressed his mouth shut so hard his chin shook.
“Grandma, just give it to her,” he said. “Please. I don’t even care about the trumpet.”
That did it.
“Grayson, honey,” I said. “Hand me your notebook.”
He gave it over. His fingers were sticky from the sugar.
I flipped back past the purple hat and the dimes to the page that started at two o’clock.
Marvin knew which page it was before I’d even turned it around.
I set it down facing him, not her.
And I put my finger on the line my grandson wrote at 2:52.
Two fifty-two
Grayson writes his log in purple glitter ink, all capitals, pressing so hard the letters come through on the next page.
The line under my finger said this:
2:52. 2 LEMONADES. $20, KEEP THE CHANGE. PIE JUDGE MAN + LADY IN SCRAMBLER SHIRT. SHE BORROWED MY PEN. HE HELD HER HAND ON THE TABLE.
Under that, smaller, squeezed against the margin, he’d added BIG TIP.
I didn’t read it out loud. I kept my finger where it was and let Marvin do the reading.
He read it the way you read a bill when you already know the total.
His eyes went across once and stopped at the end.
The clipboard came down off his chest and hung at his side.
Fred leaned in next to him and squinted. Fred leaves his glasses somewhere every single fair, and every single fair somebody brings them to the office.
“What am I looking at here, Lorrie?”
“Two fifty-two,” I said. “Ask Marvin who he bought the second lemonade for.”
Viola came around the end of the table to read it upside down.
She got as far as the word lady.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said. “He bought a vendor a drink. It’s ninety degrees out. Marvin buys everybody a drink.”
“With his hand on hers?” I said.
“A ten-year-old wrote that.”
“A ten-year-old wrote every line in there,” I said. “He wrote the purple hat too. She was a real lady. She paid in dimes.”
The man in the Packers jersey had finished the turkey leg.
Grayson stood against my hip with his sticky hands pressed flat to his shorts.
He was reading his own handwriting over Marvin’s arm.
I could see him getting to the end of the line and starting it again, the same way he’d read the scratch-off.
“There’s no ticket in there,” Viola said. “Fred. Look at it. Not one word about a ticket.”
She was right about that. There wasn’t.
But when she said it, she wasn’t looking at the notebook.
She was looking past my shoulder, across the grass, at the Scrambler.
Pete’s card table
The card table was the first thing Grayson ever asked me for.
My husband Pete bought it in 1988 at a Sears that isn’t there anymore, so we could play pinochle on Friday nights with the couple next door.
One leg was always a hair short.
Pete kept a folded matchbook from the Elks under it for thirty years and never once fixed the leg itself. He said the matchbook was part of the table now.
Pete died the winter Grayson turned six.
My daughter Erin came over that spring to help me clear out the garage, and she had the card table out on the driveway with a Goodwill sticker on it before I’d had my coffee.
Grayson sat down under it and wouldn’t come out.
“I need it for lemonade,” he said.
He was seven. He didn’t have a lemonade stand. He’d decided that minute, under the table, and that was the end of the Goodwill sticker.
The first summer he made thirty-one dollars at the fair, and I’d say nineteen of that was me buying cups when the line was slow.
The second summer he started the log.
On Tuesdays he’d come with me to the church office while Erin worked, and he’d sit at the folding chair next to mine while I did the books.
I write every check into the ledger by hand. The date, the amount, who it went to, and one line saying what it was for. “Paper plates, funeral luncheon, $14.08.” That kind of thing.
He thought that was the best thing he’d ever seen a grown-up do.
The pastor’s wife gave him a box of purple glitter pens left over from Bible school, and he tied one to the spiral of his notebook with a piece of red yarn so nobody could walk off with it.
Everybody at the fair borrows that pen. You can’t sign anything at a lemonade stand without it.
The trumpet came along in March.
It sits in the front window of the pawn shop on Main, next to a chainsaw and a box of DVDs. It’s got a dent in the bell the size of a thumbprint, and a tag on a string that says $260.
The man said he’d hold it until Labor Day if the boy put something on it every week.
So Grayson put something on it every week. Two dollars. Three. Once a whole five-dollar bill he’d got for his birthday from Pete’s brother.
That Saturday morning we’d counted the cashbox at my kitchen table before we loaded the car.
Two hundred twelve dollars, mostly in quarters, in rolls he’d done himself.
Forty-eight dollars short, with two days of fair left.
The other thing about Pete is that he bought one scratch-off every Friday.
Five dollars, at the Casey’s out on Route 27, the same as some men buy a newspaper.
And before he scratched it, he’d flip it over and sign the back right there at the counter, with whatever pen was on the string.
“A ticket’s nobody’s till your name’s on it, Lor,” he’d say.
He never won more than twenty dollars in his whole life, and he signed every one like it was a deed.
I’d thought about Pete when Grayson read that scratch-off out loud at ten after three.
I’d checked the front and the corner box, and I’d folded it back on its crease and put it away.
I never turned it over. Somebody had lost forty thousand dollars, and all I wanted was to keep it flat and dry until they came back.
Now Viola was staring at the Scrambler, and I knew why I’d kept it, because Julianna had told me.
Her thirty seconds went like this.
“That lady with the pie man is my boss. Cristina. She runs all the ride booths. That’s her ticket, she bought it this morning and showed everybody at break. She’s been sitting behind the generator truck since three o’clock crying, and she won’t come over here while that woman’s anywhere around.”
The Casey’s on Route 27
Marvin finally said something to me.
He said it to the cups, but it was meant for me.
“It’s my ticket, Lorrie. I bought it at the Casey’s on Route 27 this morning.”
The Casey’s on Route 27. Pete’s Casey’s.
He said it like a man reading a line he’d been handed.
“All right,” I said. “Then tell me what’s on it.”
Marvin opened his mouth.
Viola got there first.
“Forty thousand dollars,” she said. “Bottom right corner. The bonus box.”
Grayson looked straight up at me.
I hadn’t said that number to anybody but him. Not to Julianna. Not to the paper plate. The plate said Lose something? Ask here, and that was all it said.
A woman in line said “Oh,” and a couple of people laughed the way people laugh when a game show gets a good one.
Fred straightened up and put his hands in his back pockets, which is what Fred does when he’s decided.
“Well, Lorrie,” he said. “She knows what’s on it.”
“She knows what’s on it,” I said. “That’s not what I asked.”
“You asked what’s on it. She told you.”
“I asked Marvin.”
“Marvin’s her husband,” Fred said. “It’s one household. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you since I walked over.”
Fred and Marvin played Little League together. Fred has said so at every fair board dinner I’ve ever kept the books for. Marvin was the catcher and Fred was the boy who couldn’t hit.
“I’ve known Marvin Pemberton sixty years,” Fred said. “He has judged that pie tent for twenty-two of them without one complaint.”
“I’m not complaining about his pies.”
“Lorrie.”
“Fred, who did he buy the second lemonade for?”
“I don’t see that that matters.”
“It’s on the page,” I said. “It’s right there at 2:52.”
Fred looked at the notebook again and then looked away from it, the way you look away from a man’s zipper.
“Lorrie, I’m going to say this as a friend,” he said. “You don’t want to be the lady who read a little boy’s diary out loud at the fair to embarrass a man. That’s who you’re about to be.”
“I haven’t read it out loud.”
“Everybody here knows what it says.”
That was true. The phone was still up behind the Packers jersey. A second phone had joined it.
Marvin stood there holding his clipboard by one corner.
His knuckles had pie filling on them. Cherry, probably. He judges cherry last.
“Vi,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“We are not going anywhere without my ticket.”
“Then let the office keep it,” Marvin said. “Fred can lock it up till Monday.”
That was the second time he’d said the office.
He wanted it out of my apron and into a drawer, any drawer, where nobody would turn it over.
“The office will hand it to Marvin on Monday morning,” I said.
“The office will do what’s fair,” Fred said.
“The office is you, Fred.”
Fred didn’t argue with that.
He looked at the paper plate, and at the cashbox, and at the vendor’s permit taped to the corner of Pete’s table with packing tape.
“I’d hate for this to be about the permit,” he said. “I would really hate that.”
Grayson took hold of my apron string.
I don’t think he knew he was doing it.
Fred pulled one hand out of his back pocket and held it out across the table, palm up, exactly where Viola’s had been.
The claims line
“Call the lottery,” I said.
Fred kept his hand out. “Lorrie.”
“You’ve got a phone, Fred. There’s a number on the front of these. Call them and ask who a ticket belongs to. They give away money every day. They’ll know.”
“We don’t need the state in this,” Viola said.
She said it fast. Faster than she’d said anything.
“It’s a scratcher, Fred. This is a county fair. We don’t need some girl in Springfield.”
“If it’s Marvin’s ticket,” I said, “what do you care who Fred calls?”
Viola didn’t answer that. She turned to the line instead.
“You see this? You see how she’s dragging it out? An hour that thing’s been in her apron.”
“Fifty-five minutes,” Grayson said.
He’d looked at his log. He’d written FOUND A TICKET at 3:10, under a lady with a stroller who paid with a card he didn’t take.
Nobody laughed at that one.
Fred took his phone out. He held it at arm’s length because of the glasses.
“Read me the number, Lorrie.”
I took the ticket out of my apron for the first time since ten after three.
I opened it just enough to see the bottom of the front, where the small print is, and kept the fold pinched shut between my fingers.
I read him the 1-800 number one digit at a time.
He put it on speaker and set it face up on the cooler.
There was music. Then a recording. Then more music.
While we waited Viola leaned across the table to Grayson.
It was the first time all afternoon she’d looked at him.
“Your grandma’s going to get you in a lot of trouble today,” she said. “You know that, don’t you? When the police come, it’s going to say your name on the report. Your little stand.”
Grayson let go of my apron string and started taking the cups down off the stack.
One by one. Into the box they came in.
“Grayson, leave those,” I said.
“I want to go home.”
“We’re not done selling.”
“I don’t want to sell,” he said. “I want to go home.”
He kept stacking.
Every cup he put in that box was a dollar fifty he wasn’t getting, and he knew it to the cent.
A woman came on the line.
She said her name and the name of the lottery and asked how she could help, the way they do.
Fred bent over the cooler and told her, very slow, that he was with the Pulaski County Fair board and they had a situation with a found ticket.
“Is the ticket in your possession, sir?”
“It’s in the possession of a lady who runs a lemonade stand.”
“All right. Is the winner present?”
“There’s a dispute about that,” Fred said.
“Okay.” She’d heard that before. You could hear she’d heard it before. “So, sir, I’ll tell you what I tell everybody. An unsigned ticket is a bearer instrument. That means whoever is holding it can sign it and claim it.”
Viola’s head came around like a hawk’s.
“There,” she said. “You hear that? Whoever’s holding it. That’s what she’s been doing all afternoon. Holding it.”
“Ma’am, I didn’t say anyone should…”
“She’s going to sign her own name on my husband’s ticket and walk it out of here in that apron. Fred. You heard the woman. You heard her.”
The line had gone quiet. The twins in the wagon were asleep.
Fred stood up off the cooler and looked at me like I’d already done it.
“Give it to me, Lorrie,” he said. “Right now. I’m not playing anymore.”
I had the ticket pinched in my fingers, still folded.
Grayson had stopped stacking cups and was standing there with one in each hand.
The voice on the speaker came again, a little louder, like she’d leaned closer to her own phone.
“Ma’am, the lady who’s holding it. Before anything else. Can you turn it over and tell me if it’s signed?”
Purple glitter
I unfolded it all the way.
It had been folded so long in my apron it wanted to fold back on itself, and I had to hold it flat on the table with my palm.
Then I turned it over.
In the box on the back that says SIGNATURE, in purple glitter ink, in somebody’s careful grown-up handwriting, it said Cristina Davila.
Under it, on the line marked PHONE, there was a number with a 217 in front of it.
On the line marked DATE she’d written today.
The glitter caught the light the way it does on every page of Grayson’s notebook. It was the only pen like it on the fairgrounds.
Grayson put down both cups.
He picked up the notebook with the red yarn still tied to the spiral and the purple pen swinging off the end of it.
“That’s my pen,” he said. “Grandma. That’s my pen.”
“I know, honey.”
“She borrowed my pen. It’s in my log.”
“I know.”
Fred leaned down close and read it out loud, because he didn’t know what else to do.
“Cristina Davila.”
“Sir?” the woman on the speaker said. “Is it signed?”
“It’s signed,” I said. “Cristina Davila. With a phone number and today’s date.”
“Then that ticket belongs to Cristina Davila,” the woman said. “Nobody else can claim it. If anyone else tries to sign it or cash it, that’s a crime, and the ticket gets held. The person who signed it is the person we pay.”
Nobody said anything for a while.
Marvin sat down on the cooler next to Fred’s phone. He sat down slow, the way you sit on something you’re not sure will hold.
He put his clipboard face down on his knees.
Viola didn’t sit.
She didn’t look at the ticket, either. She looked at Marvin.
And she didn’t look surprised. That was the thing. Everybody else in that line looked surprised. Fred looked like somebody had pulled a chair out from under him.
Viola looked like a woman who’d been told the score of a game she’d watched.
“Sir, is there anything else I can help you with?” the speaker said.
Fred picked up his phone and turned it off without answering her.
I held the ticket up by one corner so the line could see the purple.
I didn’t make a speech. I’m not a speech person. I do books.
I said, “Fifty-five minutes I held this. I never signed a thing.”
Then I got my own phone out of the cashbox, where I keep it so I don’t sit on it.
I turned the ticket to the light and dialed the 217 number off the back one digit at a time, the same way I’d read the 1-800 to Fred.
Viola said, “Don’t.”
I pressed the green button.
For about two seconds there was nothing at all.
Then somewhere behind the Scrambler, past the ride booth, where the generator truck hums all day, a phone started ringing.
The generator truck
She came around the end of the Scrambler with the phone still against her ear.
Scrambler shirt. Lanyard. Her hair pulled back with a pencil stuck through it. Her eyes were swollen up so bad she looked like she’d been swimming.
She was saying “Hello? Hello?” into the phone and walking at the same time, and then she saw me holding my flip phone up, and she stopped saying it.
She stopped on the grass about ten feet from the table.
She wouldn’t come any closer. Not with Viola standing there.
“Cristina?” I said.
She nodded.
“I’ve got something of yours.”
Viola started talking.
Viola talked for a long time. I’m only going to put down the parts I remember word for word.
“Don’t you hand her that. Don’t you dare hand that woman that ticket, Lorrie.”
She took a step toward Cristina, and Cristina took a step back.
“You know what I did at two fifty-two? I stood in that quilt barn door. I’d been looking for my husband for an hour. He was supposed to be in the pie tent judging cherry.”
Marvin didn’t lift his head.
“And there he was, sitting at a little boy’s lemonade table holding hands with the carnival. Holding her hand on the table, like your boy wrote. Your boy got that exactly right. I’ll give him that.”
She laughed. It was not a real laugh.
“And she’s scratching off a lottery ticket with his free hand helping. With a quarter. And she screams. And she grabs the boy’s purple pen and writes her name on the back like she’s signing for a car.”
Grayson pressed into my side.
“And then my husband looks up and sees me. Twenty-two years. He sees me in that barn door and he grabs it right out of her hand and shoves it under your cups. Like a boy hiding a cigarette from his mother.”
“Vi,” Marvin said.
“Don’t you Vi me. You walked away from that table and left it. You left her there crying. You came and found me at the quilts and told me a story about this morning and two lemonades, and you thought I’d believe it. You thought I’d go get it back for you.”
The phones were up. Three of them now.
“I knew whose name was on the back of that ticket before this woman did,” Viola said, pointing at me. “I watched it get written.”
“Then why’d you come for it?” Fred said.
It was the first useful thing he’d said all day.
Viola looked at him like he was simple.
“I wasn’t going to cash it,” she said. “I was going to tear it in half. Right in front of her. Right in front of everybody at this fair. I was going to let her watch.”
And she came at the table.
She went for the ticket in my hand, and I pulled it back against my apron, and her hip hit the corner of Pete’s card table.
The short leg folded.
The whole thing went down on that side. The dispenser rolled off and hit the grass, and two gallons of lemonade went into the dirt in one long glug. The cashbox slid and the lid flew open and quarters went everywhere, rolls and loose ones.
The paper plate landed face up. Lose something? Ask here.
I still had the ticket. Flat against my apron with both hands.
Marvin stood up off the cooler.
He didn’t go to Viola. He didn’t go to Cristina either. He stood there between them, and then he set his clipboard down on the cooler where his wife could see it, and he walked off toward the pie tent without it.
Viola watched him go.
Then she turned on me one more time.
“Somebody told you,” she said. “You didn’t get this off a notebook. Somebody told you to dig your heels in. Who was it? That girl? That girl in the booth?”
Behind her plexiglass, Julianna was counting wristbands. She had her back to us.
“Grayson writes everything down,” I said.
That was all I said.
Viola stood there with lemonade on her good shoes.
Then she went the other direction from Marvin, toward the parking lot, and she didn’t take the blue ribbon off, and she didn’t look back.
I stepped around the table and walked the ten feet to Cristina.
I held out the ticket with the purple side up so she could see her own name.
“This came out from under our cups at ten after three,” I said.
She took it in both hands.
“He said he’d bring it to me,” she said. “He said wait behind the truck and he’d bring it.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that.
She opened her purse and got her wallet out and started pulling bills out of it, not counting, just pulling.
“No,” I said.
“Please. Please let me.”
“You paid for your lemonade,” I said. “You left a big tip. It’s in the book.”
She looked at me a long time. Then she put the wallet away and went back around the Scrambler with the ticket held against her chest, the way Marvin had held his clipboard.
Fred was on his knees in the grass picking up quarters, and bottle caps, because he couldn’t see.
When he’d got most of them he stood up and dusted his knees.
“Lorrie,” he said. “I’m going to be honest with you. The board’s not going to want you back next year.”
“I didn’t knock over the table, Fred.”
“I know you didn’t. I’m telling you what the board’s going to want. Viola’s sister is on the board. You know that.”
I knew that.
“I’ll fight for you,” he said. “I’ll fight a little.”
Grayson was on his knees by the dispenser, trying to stand it back up. There was nothing in it. He set it up anyway.
He looked at the card table lying on its side with the short leg folded under it like a bad ankle.
Then he looked at the notebook in his lap.
“Grandma,” he said. “Do I write this down?”
The pawn shop on Main
We went to the pawn shop the Saturday after Labor Day.
The man had held it two days longer than he said he would. He’d taped a piece of paper over the price tag that said SOLD – GRAYSON.
We’d never gone back for the last day of the fair. The cashbox was what it was.
Two hundred twelve dollars that morning, and twenty-two fifty from the afternoon, before Viola. The twenty-two fifty went to the hardware store for a new spigot, because the old one cracked when the dispenser hit the grass. Grayson insisted. He said the stand pays for the stand.
So it was the two hundred twelve. He’d re-rolled all of it at my kitchen table and made me count it behind him twice.
Forty-eight short.
I’d taken it out of the envelope I keep in my dresser from the church paychecks, two twenties, a five and three ones, and I’d put it in my pocketbook without telling him.
He set the quarter rolls on the glass counter one at a time, in a row, like dominoes.
The man counted them. He didn’t have to. He did it anyway, out loud, because Grayson was watching him do it.
When he got to the end he said, “Forty-eight short, chief.”
Grayson’s ears went red.
I put my hand flat on the glass next to his rolls and slid the bills across.
He looked at the bills. Then he looked at me.
“That’s your money,” he said.
“It’s the stand’s money,” I said. “I’m the stand’s grandma.”
The video was still up on the county page. Somebody had put LEMONADE LADY STEALS FROM JUDGE on it, and somebody else had put WATCH TO THE END under that. It had thirty-one thousand views. Erin read me the comments over the phone until I asked her to stop.
The fair board letter came in the same week as the trumpet. It thanked me for my years of service to the Pulaski County Fair.
Pete’s card table is in my garage. I bent the leg back with a pair of channel locks, and it still leans, and there’s a new matchbook under it.
The man brought the trumpet out from the window and set the case on the counter and opened it up.
The dent in the bell was right where it had been in March.
Grayson didn’t pick it up. He just looked at it.
Then he took the green notebook out of the back of his shorts, flipped it open on the glass to a fresh page, and uncapped the purple pen on its red yarn.
He wrote the time first, the way he always does. Then he wrote: ME. 1 TRUMPET. PAID IN QUARTERS. GRANDMA DID THE REST.
If there’s a kid in your family who writes everything down, buy them another notebook this week. And pass this one along to the person who taught you to sign the back.
For more tense moments where a small confrontation opens into a much bigger story, read the widow and the piano customer who made her a bold offer or the father who sent his family out into the cold.
