as they called it in the Windy Run. Jude Stemple lived back there. It was Jude Stemple who’d made the comment that Fern Queen had never had any kids. If he was right, then the Girl could not have been Fern’s daughter. But the people at the Windy Run Diner hinted at another view of Fern. The last time I was here, there was a girl sitting behind a stand, selling Kool-Aid, even though her sign read LEMONADE 5¢. She wasn’t there, but the table and chair and sign were, along with a pitcher of green-colored Kool-Aid. There was also a box that had once held kitchen matches, and that was where she kept her money. It was empty. I guessed the Kool-Aid must be lime, not my favorite flavor in anything, and certainly not Kool-Aid, which I didn’t much like in any flavor. I thought she wasn’t being completely honest, selling Kool-Aid for lemonade, but she had said it was a lemonade stand, not that she was selling lemonade, nor did she have to. I pulled a plastic cup from a small tower of them, poured an inch of Kool-Aid into it, and dropped a nickel into the matchbox.
