The lemonade stand went up at nine o'clock on Saturday morning, in the gravel shade at the edge of the Blue Plate lot, under a hand-lettered banner that read SAVE OUR DINER in letters of uneven height. Mrs. Abernathy, who taught second grade at Hartwell Elementary and had a voice that could organize weather, supervised the whole operation with a clipboard and a whistle she used only for emphasis. Megan Lane stood at her shoulder the entire morning, apron over her Saturday clothes, one eye on the children and one on the diner door.
The banner had been painted the night before on the diner's break-room floor, on a bedsheet donated by the Methodist church rummage sale, with Ruth supervising and Sal banned from the vicinity for offering artistic direction. The children had voted on the wording. DINERS ARE FOREVER lost, two votes to seven, to SAVE OUR DINER, which Sophie said sounded like something you would shout, and shouting, everyone agreed, was the whole point of a banner. It sagged in the middle by Saturday, which Mrs. Abernathy declared gave it character.
There were nine children, four folding tables, two coolers of lemonade, and a bake table groaning under the contributions of every grandmother in three counties. Sophie Lane, seven years old and solemn with responsibility, had been appointed treasurer by acclamation, because she owned a pickle jar and had brought it.
"Sour or sweet?" Sophie asked each customer, with the gravity of a bank examiner. "Sour is a dollar. Sweet is a dollar. Cookies are fifty cents unless you're a biker, then they're a dollar, because Mrs. Abernathy says bikers have bigger appetites."
Walt Briggs, who had come early to help set up the ride-route signs for Sunday, bought four cookies and paid with a five, and when Sophie tried to make change he looked at the pickle jar and said, "Treasurer keeps it," in a tone that ended discussion. She wrote his name in her notebook in careful block letters. WALT. FOUR COOKIES. NO CHANGE.
By ten the lot held a small, cheerful crowd. Sal Moretti came out of the kitchen twice with trays of his own biscotti, which he claimed the health department had ordered removed from the premises. Megan's ex-mother-in-law drove in from Richmond and bought a single cup of lemonade for twenty dollars and would not discuss it. Deputy Sellers stopped by between calls, purchased a cookie, fined himself a dollar for eating on duty, and put both dollars in the jar.
At noon a long-haul driver named Peterson, who had eaten at the Blue Plate since before Sophie was born, pulled his rig onto the shoulder, bought a lemonade, drank it standing, and asked whether the jar took hundreds. Told it took whatever people had, he put in a twenty and told her to keep the cup, which she logged as a fair trade for the county.
The television crew arrived at eleven, which was Ruth Calloway's doing, though she denied it to anyone who asked. A young woman from the Terre Haute station with a cameraman filmed the banner, the bake table, and Sal explaining biscotti to a skeptical nine-year-old. Then the reporter knelt beside the stand and asked Sophie what the money was for.
"It's to buy the ground," Sophie said. "The diner is already ours. The ground belongs to a man in an office. If we buy the ground, nobody can ever make us move the pancakes."
The cameraman laughed behind his lens. The reporter did not laugh. She asked, "And what happens if you don't get enough?"
Sophie considered this with the seriousness it deserved. "Then we keep pouring," she said.
The segment ran ninety seconds on the six o'clock news, between the weather and a story about a corn festival. It showed the banner, the pickle jar, Megan's tired proud face at the edge of the frame, and Sophie counting bills into Ruth's hands with the concentration of a diamond cutter. Ruth, receiving the jar at the stand while the camera rolled, had to look away and study the traffic on Route 40 until she trusted her voice.
The jar held two hundred and eleven dollars and forty cents.
By nine o'clock that night, the online fund β which a library volunteer had built and maintained β had taken in four thousand dollars more than its previous three days combined. People wrote notes with their donations. Used to eat there driving truck. My mother waited tables there in '84. Hartwell is that diner. Sal printed the notes and taped them along the pass-through until the kitchen looked papered in voices.
Ruth added the jar money to the count with a pencil, twice, as if arithmetic might improve with repetition. Then she closed the office door, sat down alone with the ledger, and allowed herself, for exactly as long as it took the coffee to go cold, to believe that Sunday might actually do it.
Chapter 17: The Ride