Harvest Spin

The last light of September goes orange over the fairgrounds around six, and that's when I like the wheel best. The bulbs come on all at once when I throw the switch, and the whole thing glows like something from a postcard. I've been running the Ferris wheel at Ashford County for one season now. My husband Patrick ran it for eight before that, and when he died I took the certification test mostly because I didn't know what else to do with my hands.

Thirty years old and a widow, and here I am at the top of a wheel with a lever in my fist. Some days that feels like a cruel trick. Most days it feels like the one solid thing I've got.

I was checking the gondola latches when I saw him in the line. I knew him before I knew I knew him, if that makes sense. Something in the shoulders. Then he turned around with a stuffed banana under his arm, and my stomach did a thing I hadn't felt in years.

Cole. From the trade program. We were both twenty-two back then, learning electrical work in a cinder block classroom in the county tech center, and he sat two seats over and made fun of my notebooks. I kissed that man at a graduation party eight years ago. One kiss, in the backyard, string lights overhead, and then his phone rang and I let it ring and never called him back. That is the entire story. That was the end of it.

Until a stuffed banana showed up in my line.

"Ticket," I said, and held my hand out, and he stared at me like the ticket was a foreign object.

"Caitlin," he said. "Caitlin Murphy. You're working the wheel."

"I'm running the wheel. There's a difference. Ticket."

He dug it out of his pocket, grinning the whole time. He was thirty now, a little fuller in the face, still had that cowlick he used to wet down and lose the war with by noon. He handed me the stub and our fingers touched and I took the stub like a professional, because I am a professional, thank you.

"You look good," he said.

"I resemble someone who has been awake since six feeding a generator. Load up."

He climbed into the gondola and I swung the gate and sent him up. I watched him the whole first revolution, which I never do. I usually count latches. He waved from the top like an idiot and I waved back before I could stop myself, and then I spent the rest of the cycle being angry at my own hand.

* * *

Here's what I remember about that kiss. It was May, the party was at our instructor's place, and Cole had been talking all night about moving out to Ohio for a factory job. I didn't want him to go. I didn't have any right to say that, since I'd never said anything else to him either. So I grabbed his shirt and pulled him down and kissed him, and he kissed me back, hard, one hand flat on my back like he was afraid I'd bolt. Then somebody inside dropped a glass, everybody laughed, and he went to Ohio and I stayed and married Patrick two years later.

I never regretted Patrick. I want to state that clearly. Patrick was good to me for five years and I loved him in the hospital and after, and I don't regret a minute. But there's a difference between not regretting a thing and not wondering about it. For five years I wondered about that one kiss, and then for two years I was too busy at a bedside to wonder about anything, and now it's been fourteen months since the funeral and the wondering is back, loud as ever.

The wheel came around and I let him off.

"Ring toss, I hear," I said.

"Game row, yeah. Booth nine. You still can't throw to save your life."

"I can throw fine. I just choose not to."

"That's not what the cornhole tournament said."

"You were at that?"

"Front row. You lost to a retiree in a bucket hat."

"He was seventy-one and he cheated, and you know it." I was smiling. Damn it, I was smiling so hard my face hurt. Fourteen months of people talking to me in that soft funeral voice, casseroles and sad nods, and this guy shows up with a stuffed banana and gives me grief about cornhole like no time has passed at all. "Go run your booth. Some of us have a job."

"Some of us are on break in twenty minutes," he said.

Well. All right then.

* * *

He came back at the bottom of the hour with two paper boats of fried dough and we ate sitting on the operator's platform, feet hanging over the edge like we were twenty-two again. The midway was lit up below us, all that noise coming up soft at this distance. Popcorn and grease in the air. He asked about the program, I asked about Ohio, and Ohio turned out to be two years of factory work and a broken engagement and a move back home, and he didn't dress any of it up and neither did I.

"I heard about your husband," he said, after a while. "I'm sorry. I mean it."

"Thank you." I watched a kid on the midway drop a ring and swear at the sky. "It was fourteen months ago. People still walk around me like I'm made of glass."

"Does it help, the wheel?"

"That's a strange question."

"I've been watching you all evening. You've got a routine. Check, check, lever, wave. You look like the only person out here who knows exactly what she's doing."

I looked at him. He wasn't being smooth about it. He was just saying it, the way he used to say things in class, straight out, no winding up.

"The wheel helps," I said. "It's the one lever in my life that does what I say when I pull it."

He laughed, then saw I wasn't joking, and stopped laughing. Good. I didn't need him laughing at that one.

"Can I say something?" he said.

"You'll say it anyway."

"I thought about that kiss for about two years. Then Ohio ate me alive and I stopped thinking about anything. But when I saw you up there in your booth tonight, first thing I thought was, there she is, and second thing was, you never called me back."

"You had a phone too."

"You kissed me. The ball was yours."

The ball was mine. That sat funny in my chest, sitting there next to fourteen months of grief and a season of greased latches and a lever that always did what I told it to. I'd spent fourteen months being carried. Casseroles, paperwork, everybody deciding things for me because I was the widow and widows are fragile. I was so tired of being fragile I could scream.

"You still think about it," I said. "The kiss."

"Every once in a while," he said, and his ears went red, and I swear that helped more than anything anyone had said to me all year.

* * *

The fair closes at ten. By a quarter past, the midway is mostly down to employees and drunks, and by half past it's just employees. I ran the wheel's last cycle for a family of five, sent them down the exit ramp, and then I stood there looking at Cole, who had closed his booth early and was leaning on my fence like he owned it.

"The wheel takes about six minutes to stop fully," I said. "But I can stop it at the top. I run this thing. I can park it anywhere I want."

He didn't say anything. Smart man. He knew a setup when he heard one.

"There's a ride at eleven," I said. "Private. Just you and me and the wind. If you want it."

"If I want it," he repeated.

"Say it plain, Cole. I don't do guessing games. Not anymore."

"Yeah," he said. "I want it."

"Then get in gondola three and don't touch anything." I threw the switch and the wheel groaned and started to turn, slow and bright, empty except for the two of us and whatever I'd decided was going to happen at the top.

He climbed in and sat down and looked at me, waiting, and for the first time in fourteen months that felt exactly right.

The wheel turned and the fair got smaller under us. I watched it happen, the lights pulling away, the noise thinning out, until we were just two people in a box hanging over a dark field. I stopped it near the top with the lever and the whole thing gave that shudder it always gives, and then there was nothing. Just wind and the creak of the gondola and Cole looking at me like he wasn't sure if he should talk.

I unzipped my jacket.

I'd been thinking about doing that for hours, honestly. Maybe longer. Maybe since he said there she is. Underneath I had a thin shirt and no bra, because I'd planned this much, at least, and I wasn't going to pretend otherwise to myself. His eyes went right where I knew they'd go and stayed there and then he made himself look up at my face, which I appreciated. Training. Somewhere, somebody had trained him.

"Here's how this goes," I said. "I've spent fourteen months being handled. Being asked how I'm doing by people who don't want the answer. Tonight I'm the one doing the handling. If you're not into that, say so now and we'll ride down and eat the rest of the fried dough and that's all this was."

"And if I am into it?" His voice cracked a little on into it. Good.

"Then you do what I say and we both have a much better night than either of us planned."