October 9th 2022

Nye County Funnel Cake

This is a piece of short fiction I wrote in 2022.

Robert Birdie, called Bobby Bird by his fellow linemen, lost his footing on a thirty-foot powerline early one Monday in August, and he would have gone careening down to his end if not for his fast hands, which grabbed hold of two live wires and killed him sooner.

That week several of his fellow linemen speculated that the deceased had gotten up early to beat the brutish Nevada sunlight. They concluded that it could have been the darkness that kept him from seeing what he was doing but it could also have been the tiredness because of the coffee he couldn't get so early in the day. His widow Lisa heard none of their speculation, nor would she have cared to. Feeling her loss and worried about where it left her, she retreated from them, from their wives, and from everyone who knew her and Robert, high-school sweethearts, as their neighbors.

At the funeral, Robert's brother Michael said “Bobby Bird” instead of “Robert,” causing Lisa to purse her lips. That was more emotion than she had shown since Robert's death, which the other linemen now, in spite of themselves, called “his passing” publicly and “the jolt” privately. Michael caught the hint in Lisa's pursed lips and ended his eulogy by asking that everyone pray for his brother Robert. Lisa's son Dylan, gripping his wife Shelby's hand beside him, afterward called his father the same in his eulogy: “Please pray for my father, Robert.”

For weeks after, Lisa lost herself. She tried getting high – “Just a little reefer” – but it was not the same as it was when she and Robert were teenagers. It made her tears bittersweet when she only wanted them bitter. Thumbing through their senior-class yearbook, which she had edited, she thought of him – too languidly, she decided.

Robert had proposed to Lisa when she told him that she was pregnant. She smiled when she remembered that. The double-barred test in her hand, she had sat down on the beaten couch beside him while he was watching the Chargers on TV. She told him and waited, thinking that no answer was going to be good, and he stood up and got down on one knee. “Really?” she said. And he laughed like she had just told him his zipper was open.

“I don't think I've ever seen a woman more in love with a man,” one of Lisa's next-door neighbors said about her to another one of her neighbors. Then they talked about baking her casseroles and lasagnas, which was just what she didn't want. The casseroles and lasagnas, those she would have taken, but she pictured her neighbors coming over, waiting for her to cry and to put on a show.

Oh, did she miss him.

USAA approved the claim three months after his burial. It was nearly ten times the highest figure Lisa could recall ever seeing in their joint bank account at once. There was to be no getaway in Aruba, she knew, but the money would change her life.

The day after she received the insurance check, Lisa waited outside the Wells Fargo for Carl Berber to unlock the front door. His greeting was morose, which suited her: money or no money, she had seen enough weepy, understanding eyes.

It was happenstance that, on her drive back to the two-bedroom ranch where she and her late husband had raised their only child, she went looking for 80s rock on the radio and found what she took as a sign instead.

It was a preacher-sounding voice. He punctuated the first word in each of his sentences before hurriedly swallowing all the words that followed it. “I – want you to tell me. Tell me one thing. That's it, just the one. You tell me. What are you going to do with your life today?”

Lisa thought the voice was a little much, but she turned up the volume all the same.

“I – can't decide this for you. It's up to you. You have to decide. It's your life. Isn't that the truth?”

Lisa nodded. Then she said aloud, “I always wanted to open my own bakery.”

Later that day, she quit her job cashiering at Vons, which she always hated. Less than twenty-four hours after that, she signed a lease on the old soda shop, which was vacant and nameless even when she was a little girl in the 70s.

On the counter at the shop, she placed three heated glass display cases that she had ordered online. She admired them and pictured them filled with the treats she would make, and then pictured them emptied, enjoyed.

The oven she got online too: it seemed big in the listings and bigger in person, she thought grinning. The steel sides were also shinier than she expected, but she still took the time to Windex them. She removed all of the magnets from her fridge at home and stuck them on the oven.

She purchased flour, powdered sugar, coconut oil, baking powder, salt, lemon juice, and paper plates in bulk at Pahrump Restaurant Supply. Canned strawberries, peaches, plums, raspberries, huckleberries, and figs she got from the Kerrys, who canned and sold fruits they bought on their weekly drives up to Salinas. From Delvin Moire, who painted the mural at the high school, she commissioned an aluminum sign, six feet by two: Nye County Bakery.

A week after the sign had gone up, nothing but funnel cakes plumped the display cases like too many cornfields on the ground from thirty thousand feet in the air. Next to the oven, Lisa felt hot, even though she had set the air conditioning to seventy. She luxuriated between her spot directly in front of the oven and her spot behind the cash register, switching between too hot and too cold.

This is my place, she thought to herself.

---

At the grand opening of Nye County Bakery it was Robert's brother Michael and Lisa's friends Cori, from high school, and Mary, from Vons. Lisa tied a red ribbon across the doorway, using chairs to prop open the doors, and then took a pair of scissors to the ribbon. As she did so, she said, “We're open for business,” and Michael, Cori, and Mary all clapped.

Friends and neighbors, mourners really, trickled into the bakery the next few days. In their Fords and Hondas, they crowded the parking lot. It looked like a grand-opening week. Lisa's customers complimented her on her funnel cake and asked her where she learned to make it. She told them, “My mother taught me. She learned it working the original Six Flags down Arlington way in the 60s. She was there on opening day, you know.”

The trickle slowed to a drip after a week. The following Wednesday, Lisa felt anxious around eleven, asking herself what she would do if no one showed up at all, and when two or three straggled in during the afternoon, she could close the doors at eight feeling relieved.

Ten days after the grand opening, no one did show up. At eight Lisa rested her head against one of her display cases but deciding that it was “too soapy” to cry there like that, locked the front door and instead cried in the bathroom. She left the funnel cakes to stale overnight, giving herself permission to toss them in the morning. At home she cried once more and went to bed.

It was the afternoon after the no-customer day that her son Dylan made his first visit to Nye County Bakery. She was in the restroom when he walked in and seeing him, held her breath out of joy for the moment before she realized who he was. Uh-oh, she thought, knowing how her son was and what he would think of this.

He looked up and down and around at the bakery's walls, her display cases, the two tables and four chairs set in the corner, and then his mother, as if he was saying nothing foul and nothing nice at the same time.

“Welcome,” Lisa said warmly.

“Hi Mom,” Dylan said.

Lisa suspected that her son had spied on her, waiting for the crowd to taper off to nothing so that he could walk in like this, do this, whatever he was doing, but she couldn't say that because then she would lose.

“What can I get for you, honey?”

Dylan peered into the display cases. “It looks like funnel cake or nothing.”

“Yep, that is our specialty. Grandma's recipe. We're a bakery that does funnel cake.”

“Did you talk to someone about this?” her son asked her.

“About the bakery? Of course. I had to get the lease on the old soda shop. I had to buy all this stuff. It's all brand new,” she said. Then she added, “I messaged you about the grand opening.”

“I mean someone who knows this stuff. There are consultants, like business consultants. There are bakery business consultants, I'm sure.”

“Oh. No,” Lisa replied. “What's to consult? It's a bakery.”

“Yeah, I see that, Mom. It just doesn't look too busy in here. I don't want to get into an argument. Is this what you used Dad's money for?”

This she didn't answer.

He continued, “You got a business plan? No one even comes down over here. Have you seen a single car on this road all day? It's a fine business idea, Mom. A bakery. You just need more than an idea.”

“Well. It's still early,” she said. She tapped the front of her cash register. “I'll get the hang of it. Got the hang of being a mama. Wasn't anyone to consult about that.”

“All right, Mom,” Dylan said. “I got to get on to work. We're digging out two pools in Henderson today.”

“That's excellent, Dylan. Can I get you a funnel cake for the drive?”

“Not now. I'll take a strawberry one – later. Later in the week, I'll stop by again.”

“All right. You drive safe,” Lisa said, a soft smile at her mouth.

Walking out the front door, Dylan turned back to her. “You should talk to someone about this,” he said.

“I will. Love you,” she said.

Guiltily she thought, Proud snothead.

---

The emptiness was devastating. Lisa blamed herself for it. That was the devastating part. She was enjoying the quiet, which had not lost its novelty after twenty years of squeaky shopping-cart wheels and checkout-aisle dings. When she caught herself adding up the money she lost each day that she sold fewer than forty funnel cakes, her break-even, she silently reminded herself, This is my place. Half the time, she managed not to follow that up with, That isn't enough to keep the lights on.

She thought that Robert would have known better. He would have told her to take all the money and – what? They had never seen that kind of money before. What would he have done with it all? she wondered. She pictured him buying rare coins and taking them in to Vegas to get appraised on that pawn show. Even if he lost money on that, the loss wouldn't be as big as the one she would take by the end of the year, at this rate, and he would have gotten on TV out of the deal.

Dylan certainly knew better, but she was not going to tell him that. That's all he needs, she thought. It was like the summer after Dylan turned eighteen and moved out: Robert had picked up a second job, “to stay busy,” and when all she wanted to do was talk about Dylan and complain about missing him, she had to suffer without any talking or complaining at all.

Lisa looked at her deserted bakery and the lonely desert road outside and thought, It's that summer all over again.

A week passed, then another. Lisa would set out a single display case of funnel cakes in the mornings and throw them out in the evenings. It became routine.

On the first Tuesday into her fourth week at the bakery, she daydreamed about him. She remembered that when they were sixteen, she had convinced him to drive around their neighborhood until they saw a fridge in an open garage – and then jack whatever beer they found in the bridge. She didn't like beer, but since her friend Cori had said her boyfriend did this, Lisa hadn't been able to stop thinking about it, wishing that Robert would do it for her too. It took her weeks of needling and sweet-talking. At the first fridge they saw, he stopped his ‘74 Mustang and parked it at the end of the driveway. He was opening the fridge when another car pulled up. “Robert!” she called out to him.

Someone snapped her out of her memories: it was Victoria, her cousin who wore her hair in a bob and shoulder pads in a brown blazer.

“Lisa, I heard! This is very exciting.”

“Victoria,” Lisa said half-heartedly. “Thank you. Isn't it?”

“Well, it is. It is something. Look at this. It's your place, isn't it?”

“It is,” Lisa said, a twinge of glee she didn't bother hiding. “What can I get for you?”

“It's all funnel cakes?” Victoria asked, eyeing the one full and two empty display cases.

“Yep, we've got funnel cakes. I can make them with extra sugar, I can make them with jam. I've got strawberry, peach, plum, raspberry, huckleberry, and fig.”

“I'm actually on a diet,” Victoria said. “But I heard about this and I just had to see it.”

Dejection, antipathy, Lisa said, “Oh. That's all right.” Then she said, “How are things?”

“Things. Things are good. Very good, actually.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, very good. You know, I've been doing this new thing for a while.”

“Really?” Lisa asked, more polite than curious.

“Yes. Oh, it is something. It's this, you know,” cupping her hands around her mouth, mocking the bakery's desolation, “opportunity.”

“An opportunity,” Lisa repeated. “That's very nice.”

“Oh, it's been wonderful, Leez. I feel like I was waiting for it my whole life.”

Lisa nodded along to the words. She had never seen her cousin Victoria so jolly before. It was catching. I feel good, Lisa thought.

“You,” Victoria said, “would be perfect for it too.”

“Me?”

“Oh my, yes. You would be. It would just fit you. Do you know anything about crystals?”

“I don't think so,” Lisa said.

“Don't you worry. I'm going to send you some stuff to look at. You've still got that same e-mail, right? I'll send it on over tonight. Really, it would be great for you. It is some opportunity.”

“Good, good,” Lisa said.

“I have to run now, but look out for that e-mail.”

“All right,” Lisa said. “Are you sure I can't get you any cake?”

“None for me, doll. But look at you here – your own boss! This is just great. Excellent, Leez.”

Then, Victoria was gone. Lisa was alone again. She thought once more that she had never seen Victoria, in all their years, in any mood like that. Smiling so much. Did she call me doll? I like that. I should try that. I'll call someone doll.

“The next person who walks in today,” she said aloud.

But she didn't get to call anyone doll.

---

A few days after Lisa saw Victoria, Lisa's daughter-in-law Shelby called to ask about the bakery. Lisa explained to her daughter-in-law everything that had been going on in her life: the insurance money, the grand opening, slow sales, Victoria's opportunity. Shelby listened, all ears and attention, and then said that she would stop in at the bakery – “not today, tomorrow.” That meant Lisa needed to tidy up, make the place shine, to plump up all of the jams and see that the dough in the air smelled even sugarier. Get Shelby to see what she saw in the bakery, Lisa reasoned with herself, and Dylan would see it too.

Lisa's cleaning the next morning was rapturous. She found the taut line in herself again, the one that had yanked her into the lease on the old soda shop. Under her two tables, she shined the metal bases, and in the wall corners, she rubbed perfume, to add a mysterious allure to grab a seat and stay a while. She wiped down the glass display cases three times, four times, five times, setting herself a limpid end she would never reach – but thinking, let my elbow fall out of its socket for trying.

Get it right, she thought. This is my place. I have to make it look absolutely right. There can't be any dust. There can't be anything but the tables and the funnel cakes. Sit down and enjoy them.

Shelby would, Lisa knew, ask how she had paid for the bakery. Even though she would know the answer already, she would ask this question because Dylan would tell her to ask it. Shelby was loyal to Dylan like that, and what kind of mother would Lisa be to say that was a fault? Lisa would tell Shelby the answer, as if it was a harmless question, and Shelby would leave it at that, smiling and changing the subject, complimenting Lisa on the sign above the door or the smell of the cake.

At Robert's funeral, Shelby sat on Lisa's side so that Lisa was between her son and her daughter-in-law, the two of them closing in on her. Lisa hadn't asked Shelby to do that. She thought that Dylan must have, but she stopped herself, chose to believe Shelby did it on her own. My daughter-in-law, Lisa thought, gripping Shelby's hand.

Shelby was only fifteen when she met Lisa. She was Dylan's high-school sweetheart, the same way that Lisa had been Robert's. The night of Dylan's junior prom, their first date, also the same as Lisa and Robert, Lisa told Shelby, “That means we're kindred spirits.” Shelby said, “Huh?” And Lisa thought, Yep, kindred spirits. I wouldn't have known at fifteen what that meant either.

The glimmer of her two tables was strong from where she stood. She thought that her counters must not have looked so new since the last time there were two-strawed glasses full of cream soda on top of them. The clock ticked on the wall but signified nothing because everything was ready: the bakery was the way it had to be, and if the seconds passed, then it was their own business, Lisa and her spotless bakery suspended there in time. From her purse, which sat under the counter, far away from its usual place on top of it, she took a tube of lipstick, the reddest one that she had been able to find in her bathroom cabinet, and ran it around her lips.

In the display cases, which she had stuffed full for the first time in weeks, there were funnel cakes set carefully in rows, the wax paper beneath them pulled upward neatly so that their corners pressed against each other. The cases were all funnel cake except for one, an empty space, left there – Because why shouldn't she think there are some people enjoying them.

A car pulled up in the parking lot: it was Shelby's and Dylan's Durango.

This is it, Lisa thought. Then, she dropped her lipstick.

She bent over to get it. The door had swung open, she could hear, and when she came back up, Shelby wasn't there.

It was Dylan, shaking his head like a pastor slinging shame in bulk on Sunday.

“Mom, what is this opportunity you're investing in?”

Lisa sighed and thought, I never did trust that girl.

---

The days seemed to roll into their tumbling ends. Eleven blended into noon into one, and then some blur later, it was over and through. The cash register hadn't dinged; the front door hadn't opened. If not for the desert breeze, the grains of sand in the parking lot would have stayed the same from the moment that Lisa pulled up in the morning to the moment that she pulled out in the evening.

She thought about her cash register at Vons. Its dings were ceaseless. She had tensed at them, learning to expect them from the ruffle that bags of bread made and from the “ooh” that kids sounded when their mothers picked up boxes of Chips Ahoy! and Cap'n Crunch. Exhale, she would think. Exhale and the dings lost their power. Now though, she missed the dings. She longed to feel another kind of tension again.

Where is everyone? she hadn't wondered in days. She was past that. This was business, the slow, disappointing grind that left her beat but never tired, worn-down rather than worn-out. She mulled paying off the lease all at once, not to save any money, just to abandon the property and never think of it again.

In a few years, she could tell the story of this place however she wanted to tell it. She could label it: that-silly-bakery-thing, my-big-oops, over-and-done-with. When people asked her, “How'd that ever go?” she could guffaw at it – at herself. She could tell them, “Let me tell you just how it went.” Then, outright laugh about it.

How rueful would her laugh be? Would anyone believe it? Would it be true? Here and now, there was no way for her to say. She could no more tell how soon she could laugh about her pain than she could up and stop feeling it. The bakery was empty and in its emptiness, only hurt.

Lisa was thinking back on Robert's funeral, to the fuzziness of the floor when she knelt on it to say good-bye to him, remembering picking a piece of green shag off her black dress, wondering wanly why a funeral home would put in shag carpeting, when the bakery door opened. She looked up dazed from her memory, and a family stood in front of her.

It was a man and three children, two boys and a girl. The man and the girl wore cowboy hats, and although the girl didn't wear the boots and jeans to match the way the man did, they fit. Their hats matched each other, which Lisa decided was enough.

“Howdy,” the man said. He grinned, not a smile but a grin.

A stranger, Lisa thought. He was happy to be there – to be here. Why? He fascinated her, but she dismissed the fascination: throw scraps outside for the town dogs and she would still question what brought in the crowd.

“Hello,” said Lisa. Then she caught herself. “Welcome.”

“Y'all serving – what's that? Funnel cake?”

“Yes,” Lisa said. “We have funnel cakes. That's our specialty.” Then catching her wind, “And if you can think up a topping, I betcha I've got it back here.”

“Oh yeah? That sounds all right to me. How about you kids?” he asked, laughing heartily when they cheered right on cue. “I ain't had much funnel cake in a while. What's that you go there, strawberry? I'll take one of those. And then I s'pose if I want to stay out of trouble then I owe one to each of these cowpokes too.”

“I suppose you're right,” Lisa said. Then to the kids she said, “What looks good? I've got peaches, raspberries. Everyone loves raspberries.”

A raspberry each for the boys and a peach-strawberry mix for the girl, the man and his family spread out across Lisa's two tables and ate. They laughed. The place felt alive. When they were halfway through, Lisa stepped out from behind the counter and offered to freshen up their funnel cakes, holding a clear shaker of powdered sugar in front of herself.

“That sounds fine to me,” the man said. “We got time. Just going to see Yellow Mama, ain't we?” Again right on cue, the kids cheered.

“That sounds like fun,” Lisa said. “Most days, seems I can go a stretch and not see a single car on this road. Where is Yellow Mama?”

The man, whom Lisa was starting to think was a touch theatrical, said, “Oof! You're out here, running the Nye County Bakery, and you don't know Yellow Mama? It's not far, just thirty miles or so straight down that way.”

Lisa shook her head, good-natured, inquisitive.

“Well, I'll tell ya then,” the man said. “Out here, not too far off the highway, they got this place, I don't know if you know it, called Teppadoe State. It's a, uh, hotel of sorts. Except this hotel, they don't have any guests anymore. It's an old hotel, you see, so they've gone and turned it into a museum. People like us, just a-wandering on a day off, we can go look inside the rooms and check out all the amenities that they used to have, including Yellow Mama. That's their most special amenity. Gruesome Gertie? Old Sparky? The Lightning? They don't got anyone riding her anymore, but you can pop in for a peek. She was the last one ever used in the State of Nevada.”

Lisa nodded, enthralled. “That sounds like quite a day you have planned.”

“Oh, I'm sure that it will be. Surprised you didn't hear about it? Museum just opened. It was all over the radio. NBC did a thing about it on the news too.”

“Oh?”

“Yep, I know we're looking forward to it.”

“Well. I hope that you have a very nice time,” Lisa said. Then she tapped a little more powdered sugar onto each of their funnel cakes and went back to her counter.

---

In the time since Dylan and Shelby had spoken to Lisa, they decided that they needed to protect her from Victoria and whatever the grand opportunity was. “We'll just call her out in front of Mom,” Dylan said.

He and Shelby felt responsible for her. If the bakery failed, failed hard enough, it could wipe out any claim she had made on Robert's life insurance, and Victoria there to feed on the scraps, poor Mom could wind up a pecked-out skeleton – ghoulish there among all those uneaten funnel cakes.

Shelby called Victoria and told her that Lisa had mentioned Victoria's business opportunity and they both wanted in on it.

“You want to buy in too?” Victoria asked.

“Isn't that all right? It just sounds like something I'd like to get in on the ground floor.”

“Of course, sure. I understand, believe me. Yes.”

“Great,” Shelby said. “Let's meet down at Lisa's bakery in an hour.”

Shelby and Dylan each wondered if they were doing something wrong. Shelby thought if Victoria wasn't asking for too much money, then why keep Lisa from it? Say a thousand dollars: she had watched people drop more than that on a hand of cards in Vegas and said nothing. Dylan, though, didn't think of saying nothing to his mother about Victoria. That wasn't an option – but the bakery? Was that the wrong setting for this? Maybe it would work out better if we all met at Mom's house, he thought.

Neither Shelby nor Dylan voiced any concerns. Instead, they drove to Nye County Bakery, pulling up around the same time Victoria did. They saw her green Kia Sedona. Their eyes met hers. There was something else, though: the Kia Sedona wasn't the only other car pulling up.

It was a mob. There were cars everywhere. The parking lot was full.

Shelby parked her and Dylan's car on the street outside the parking lot. Victoria did the same.

Men in cowboy hats, women in tank tops, kids in basketball shoes: there were tourists everywhere, dressed like tourists, chatting and laughing like tourists. They were care-free, no one there in a rush, everyone where they meant to be.

Some of the tourists held half-eaten funnel cakes on plates in front of themselves. Those who didn't seemed more focused: they were standing in the line, which encircled the building, or watching someone else who was standing in the line. Their sight seemed singular, whether they were holding a funnel cake or waiting for one.

Shelby, Dylan, and Victoria peered into the bakery at Lisa. Behind the counter, she was speaking with customers and passing out plates of funnel cake. A minute passed: how many plates was that? Nine? Ten? Her hands were fast but faultless. She served up her cakes and with them, a “Thank you, enjoy” and a bright smile.

Dylan approached the counter, gently nudging his way along the edge of the line.

“Mom?” he asked.

“Oh, baby!” Lisa shouted so that he could hear her over the chittering murmur of the bubbly, overflow crowd. “Look at all this, huh?”

“What happened?”

“Happened? Lord – someone showed up!”

“This is amazing,” he said. “Is there anything we can do to help?”

She didn't hear him, though. Taking orders, counting change, she was busy, and Dylan, Shelby, Victoria, they didn't have anything to offer her, neither unwelcome advice nor suspicious opportunities, nothing at all. She was busy, and that was fine. Busy, that was what she wanted. It was perfect. Could they do anything to help? No.

But, she thought to tell them, it's only five dollars for one of my Nye County Bakery Electric-Chair Funnel Cakes. Old Sparky I color on there in purple raspberry jam, the bolts of lighting are yellow marmalade, and it's the only snack to have if you're headed out to see Nevada's last electric chair at Tippadoe State Penitentiary Museum.

Billy Gardner McIntyre