The Lemon Pancake Stand

Part One · The Cost Sheet

On the first Saturday of June, every household on Alder Lane dragged its unwanted possessions out onto the grass and sold them to strangers, and the strangers arrived early. Felix Marsh had been planning for this particular Saturday since the middle of May. That was when he had wandered into Mr. Gale's garage and discovered a telescope standing in the corner, with a sticker on its tube that said forty dollars. It was a proper telescope, black and heavy, with a mirror the size of a dinner plate. Felix had eleven dollars and fifty cents in a jam jar. He also had a plan, written out on graph paper, with every number checked twice.

The plan was pancakes. The bargain hunters started arriving at seven in the morning, before anybody had eaten breakfast. Felix intended to be standing at the end of his own driveway with a hot griddle and a hand-lettered sign when they came. His cost sheet listed flour, eggs, milk, butter and a bottle of syrup, and it came to nine dollars and change. At a dollar apiece, forty pancakes would carry him to the telescope with money to spare. He had discovered the electric griddle at the back of the kitchen cupboard and tested it on the counter, where it had heated up with a satisfying tick. Everything was ready except the batter.

His sister Ruby, who was nine, wanted in. She proposed a lemonade stand on the same table, with the profits divided down the middle, and she had already drawn the sign. Felix explained, with what he considered enormous patience, that the table was his, that lemonade was for little kids, and that she would get sticky fingerprints all over the cost sheet. Ruby listened to the entire speech without blinking. Then she said fine, in the particular voice that meant it was not fine at all, and went away to locate a card table of her own. By suppertime the whole house smelled of lemons.

On Friday evening Felix tripled the recipe in the largest bowl in the kitchen, measuring each ingredient with the concentration of a surgeon. Three cups of flour. Three eggs. Three tablespoons of baking soda, which he was reasonably certain was the same thing as baking powder. Their father helped him carry the folding table to the end of the driveway and run an extension cord out through the garage. Then he announced that the stand belonged to Felix and he was only a customer. Across the hall, Ruby was squeezing her fourteenth lemon into a pitcher and humming. Felix set his alarm for a quarter to six and lay awake for an hour doing the arithmetic again.

Saturday came up foggy and cold, with the lane invisible beyond the third house and the sound of folding tables unfolding in every direction. Mrs. Pratt, three doors down, was arranging forty-one china cats in order of size. Felix set out the sign, the plates, the syrup and the jar for money, and plugged in the griddle. The garage freezer hummed. The griddle ticked. Then, with a small decisive click, both of them stopped, and the garage went dark. His father appeared in the doorway in his dressing gown, pointed silently at the gray metal box on the wall, and went back inside to let him read the labels himself.

The labels explained that the garage and the freezer shared one circuit. The circuit had evidently decided it could not manage a freezer and a griddle at the same time. Felix flipped the breaker back on, unplugged the griddle, and ran the extension cord to the socket on the front porch instead, which took eleven minutes he did not have. By the time the griddle was ticking again, the first bargain hunters were drifting through the fog with their hands in their pockets. Across the driveway, Ruby was pouring her first cup of lemonade for a man in a fishing hat. Felix ladled out four pancakes and watched them spread.

Part Two · Soap

They did not spread the way pancakes were supposed to. They spread flat and thin and remained that way, and when he turned them over they were the color of wet cardboard. His father, who had come out in his coat to be the first customer, paid a full dollar and ate one standing up. He chewed for a long time. He said it was interesting. Felix tore a corner off the next one and put it in his mouth, and his whole face tightened, because the pancake tasted precisely the way the bathroom smelled after somebody cleaned it. Soap. Three tablespoons of baking soda had produced forty pancakes that tasted of soap.

Mrs. Pratt bought one out of kindness, took a bite, and said it reminded her of a cake her aunt had once made in 1974. Felix stood over the bowl of gray batter, nine dollars of flour and eggs and milk, and tried to remember what the difference was. Baking powder had something sour mixed into it already, so it fizzed on its own. Baking soda was only half of the recipe. It needed something sour to argue with before it would make bubbles, and without that argument it simply sat in the batter tasting of soap. He had seen it at school, in a paper volcano. Vinegar and soda. The sour thing was the missing half.

There was vinegar in the kitchen, but vinegar pancakes did not sound like an improvement. Buttermilk would have worked, and so would yogurt, and the house contained neither. What the house contained, at that particular moment, was a bowl of freshly squeezed lemon juice sitting on a card table across the driveway, beside a sign that said LEMONADE, FIFTY CENTS, NO REFUNDS. Felix looked at the bowl for a long moment. He looked at his sister, who was counting coins with her tongue between her teeth. He considered how it would feel to walk across the driveway and ask. Then he wiped his hands on his apron and walked across the driveway.

Ruby heard him out with an expression she had learned from their mother. Then she named her terms. Half a cup of lemon juice, she said, in exchange for her name on his sign next year, in letters the same size as his. Felix said he would consider it. Ruby said the lemon juice was available now and the considering could happen later, and she measured out half a cup with tremendous precision and handed it over without spilling a drop. He said thank you, which cost him something. She said he was welcome, which evidently cost her nothing at all.

The lemon juice went into the batter and the batter came alive. It fizzed like a glass of soda, rose in the bowl, and turned pale and thick and full of tiny holes. The first pancake off the griddle was tall and golden with crisp lacy edges, and it tasted of butter and faintly of lemon. His father, eating it in the fog, said oh in an entirely different voice. By the time Felix had a stack of six on the plate, three of them had vanished down the throat of Biscuit, Mrs. Pratt's dog, who had been waiting for exactly this opportunity since dawn.

Part Three · First Look

After that the morning went quickly. By eight the lane was crowded, and a man with a van was negotiating for all forty-one china cats. A woman with a baby asked Felix whether there was anything to drink with the pancakes. He pointed across the driveway. She bought a pancake and a lemonade, ate them together on the curb, and informed everybody within earshot that lemon pancakes and lemonade went together like Saturday and sleeping in. Ten minutes later Ruby appeared at his elbow with her pitcher and set it down on his table without asking. Felix moved the syrup to make room.

He ran out of batter at twenty to ten, and Ruby ran out of lemons five minutes later, and the two of them sat on the curb with their jars and counted. Felix had made twenty-three dollars. With the jam jar that came to thirty-four dollars and fifty cents, which was five dollars and fifty cents short of a telescope. Ruby had made seventeen dollars, mostly in quarters. She did not say anything. She did not need to. Up the lane, in Mr. Gale's garage, a stranger in a baseball cap was tilting the telescope and squinting down its tube.

Felix ran. The stranger, as it turned out, decided the telescope was too heavy for his car and wandered off toward the china cats. Mr. Gale, who was eighty and had spent forty years looking at the moon through that tube, said the price was the price, kindly but firmly. He wanted it to go to somebody who would actually use it. Felix stood in the garage with thirty-four dollars and fifty cents and thought about lemonade being for little kids. Then he walked back down the lane to the curb, sat beside his sister, and asked her, properly, what she would want for five dollars and fifty cents.

Ruby's terms were simple, and she had obviously been preparing them. First look through the telescope, every night, for a week. Her name on the sign, in yellow, starting immediately. And he was never, ever to say the thing about little kids again. Felix agreed to all three. They carried the telescope home between them, Mr. Gale walking behind with the eyepiece in his coat pocket and a page of instructions, which turned out to be mainly about not touching the mirror. Then they spent the afternoon scraping soap batter into the compost and scrubbing the griddle, which Ruby said was part of the deal too.

The moon came up over the roofs at ten o'clock that night, and the two of them sat on the driveway in their coats with the telescope aimed at it. Ruby looked first, as agreed. She put her eye to the eyepiece and the moon swung into view, enormous and gray and pocked with craters, close enough that it seemed you could lean out and touch it. For once in her life she said nothing at all. Felix waited his turn with his hands in his pockets. In the garage behind them the sign leaned against the wall, FELIX'S PANCAKES in black, and underneath it, in yellow marker, slightly too large, AND RUBY'S LEMONADE.