The folding table cost me thirty-five dollars to rent for the weekend, and by Sunday afternoon my feet felt like they were packed in dry sand. I had sixty jars of pepper jelly sitting on that scarred piece of plywood under the hot tent at the county fair outside Dayton.

My labels were printed on cardstock from the desktop printer in my spare bedroom, cut out with kitchen shears that left little jagged edges on the corners.

Royce came by around noon on Saturday with Della and two of his buddies from the hardware supply warehouse. He picked up a jar of the habanero peach, turned it over twice in his big, calloused hands, and set it back down with a little clink against the wood.

“Cute little hobby, Nadine,” he said, and he gave Della that sideways look husbands give when they think their wives are playing house. “You girls and your little crafts. Does it taste like actual food or just burn?”

Della laughed, right there over the smell of fried dough and horse manure from the track. Their friends laughed too, easy and loud, the way people laugh when they have never had to worry about a single extra dollar at the grocery store.

I didn’t say a thing back. I never was much for talking when I was mad, because my voice has a way of shaking if I let the heat get up into my throat. I just took the jar he had put down, wiped a speck of dust off the glass with the edge of my apron, and put it right back in the center of the display.

I made two hundred and fourteen dollars that weekend. I wrote every single jar down in a black and white composition book with wide rules, the exact same kind my daddy used to keep track of spare parts at the grain elevator.

I went back to my job at the credit union on Monday morning at eight sharp. I sat at my window, stamped loan applications, and smiled at people who wanted to buy second cars they could not afford. At night, after the sun went down behind the telephone poles on Maple Street, I turned the kitchen stove into a steam bath.

The copper pot my grandmother gave me took up two burners, and the steam peeled the wallpaper right above the toaster.

My hands stayed stained red from the peppers for six months out of the year. My knuckles cracked in November when the dry cold set in, and I didn’t care.

The notebook kept filling up. By the second year, I had four folding tables at four different fairs across Montgomery County. By the third year, Hadley’s grocery store down on Main put six jars on the wooden shelf right by the register, and the owner, an old man named Arthur who smelled like peppermint and stale cigars, called me on a Tuesday morning to tell me they were gone.

“Bring me thirty more, Nadine,” he said into the receiver. “And don’t skimp on the hot green ones. The contractors down at the site buy three at a time for their lunch pails.”

That was the year Royce lost his job at the plant when they shifted the second shift down to Louisville.

Della called me on a Thursday night. Her voice was thin, the way it gets when she has been crying in the laundry room so her kids don’t hear her. She didn’t ask how I was doing, and she didn’t mention the fair or the little folding table. She just asked if I had any of that jelly work she could help with for a little cash to tide them over until Royce found something else.

“Come on Tuesday at seven,” I told her. “I have jars to wash.”

She showed up wearing an old sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up. I handed her a stack of mason jars and a bottle of vinegar water and pointed her toward the kitchen table. We worked for four hours in near silence, the radio playing old country stations out of Springfield while she dried the glass.

I paid her twenty-two dollars an hour out of the cash box I kept under the mattress. I never once brought up the fair booth. I never reminded her of the way Royce had laughed at the cardstock labels. I just handed her the folded bills in an envelope at the end of the shift, and she took them without looking me in the eye.

Royce didn’t find anything steady at the plant. He took odd jobs here and there, roofing when his back didn’t act up, cutting grass for people who didn’t want to sweat in July. He started carrying himself like a man who felt smaller every time he walked through his own front door.

By last year, my kitchen wasn’t big enough for the steam or the crates of mason jars. I bought the old brick storefront down on 4th Street that used to be a dry cleaner’s. I put in stainless steel counters, two commercial burners, and a walk-in cooler that hummed like a low-flying plane.

I hired four women to help me run the lines. Every single one of them was somebody’s mother or aunt who had been let go from a department store or left high and dry when an old man passed away and left the family farm to a cousin three states over. We worked side by side in hairnets and rubber boots, chopping peppers until our eyes watered and laughing about things that didn’t matter.

I put my own name on the label. Not in some fancy designer font from an agency in Chicago, but scanned straight out of that first composition book from the fair, written in my own handwriting with the ink a little smudged where my thumb had pressed against the paper.

Last month a clean gray car pulled up to the loading dock behind the shop. A man in a pressed golf shirt and loafers stepped out, holding a leather folder under his arm. His name was Preston, and he represented a regional chain with thirty-four stores from Toledo down to Cincinnati.

He walked the racks with a little silver spoon in his breast pocket. He tasted the peach habanero, then the smoked garlic jelly, then the thick plum preserves I only make when the fruit is coming in heavy from my neighbor’s trees.

“Sit down with me, Nadine,” he said when he was done.

We sat at the small metal table in the breakroom where the coffee pot was always half-full of sludge. He opened his folder, turned a paper around toward me, and pointed a clean fingernail at a row of figures.

He said a number. It was more money than my daddy made in five years at the grain elevator.

I didn’t jump. I didn’t clap my hands or start crying the way women do in the movies. I just looked at him across the table until he shifted in his seat.

“Say it again,” I told him.

He blinked once, surprised, then he smoothed his tie and said the number again, clear and slow, naming the thirty-four stores where those little jars with my handwritten name would sit right at eye level near the register.

I signed the papers right there on the breakroom table using my old blue ballpoint pen.

That Sunday was Della’s turn to host supper. She still lived in the same split-level on Elm Street with the peeling paint on the carport, the one Royce had bragged about buying back when he thought a warehouse job made him a king.

The house smelled like overcooked pork chops and canned green beans cooked with salt pork. Royce was sitting in his usual recliner with the stuffing coming out of the left arm, watching a baseball game with the sound turned down low so he could complain about the politicians on the cable news.

“Still making that little jelly thing, Nadine?” he asked without looking up from the screen as I set a bowl of mashed potatoes down on the oilcloth tablecloth.

Della came out of the kitchen with a plate of rolls that looked a little dry around the edges. She didn’t look at me either. She was tired, the way people are when they spend twenty years waiting for a break that never comes down the track.

I picked up the gravy boat, handed it across the table to Royce, and watched his thick fingers wrap around the ceramic handle.

“It’s going fine, Royce,” I said. My voice didn’t shake at all.

I didn’t tell him about Preston. I didn’t tell him that the contract sitting in my canvas bag out in the car had thirty-four stores attached to it and a number that could have bought his entire street twice over. I just sat down in the metal chair by the window, unfolded my cloth napkin into my lap, and waited for Della to pass the butter.