One Night at the Fair

My name is Nikki Sutherland and I turned thirty-four this spring, which means I have now been a widow for three years, which is longer than I was a wife. Melinda died in October, three years ago, and every year since then the county fair has landed on my calendar like a chore I agreed to back when I was a different person. I run a flower shop over on Delmore Street, and every August the fair people call me and ask if I want a booth at the flower judging, and every August I say yes before I can think of a reason to say no. It is not that I hate the fair. It is that the fair is the one day a year when everyone in town knows exactly what to say to me and says it all day long.

I want to tell you how that went this year, but first I should explain the thing about sympathy, because it is the key to the whole day. When you have been widowed in a small town, people do two things to you. The first thing is they avoid your eyes. The second thing is, once a year or so, they hold your hand a beat too long and tell you how strong you are. Neither one is cruel. Both of them make me want to stand inside a walk-in cooler until the person leaves. So I had learned to build my days in ways that kept me moving, and a booth at the fair was perfect for that, because a booth gives you a job. You can arrange stems. You can hand out little cards with the shop address on them. You can look busy, and looking busy is a kind of armor that nobody argues with.

The pavilion at Shady Cove Lake is this big open metal building right next to the fuel dock, and on judging day it smells like fertilizer and sunscreen and fryer oil drifting over from the food trailers. I had driven over at eight that morning with the van full of sunflowers and zinnias and those dahlias I always hope will win, and I had set everything up in a careful line, and by ten I had already heard the word strong four times from four different people. So when the woman came up to my booth at around eleven, I was braced for the usual and got something else entirely.

She came up from the dock side, moving fast, and she was looking at the ground behind me rather than at me. Later she told me she had walked the whole fair twice and was starting to feel ridiculous. At the time all I saw was a woman in a faded green canvas jacket, thirty-two years old or so, short dark hair that she pushed off her forehead with the back of her wrist the way people do when their hands are full of leash and flyers. The leash was empty. The flyers said LOST DOG in big marker letters, with a photo of a brown mixed breed and the name Buddy underneath.

She stopped in front of the booth and looked up and I saw her face properly for the first time, and my first thought was that she had the kind of direct stare you almost never get in this town. People here look slightly off to the side of you, especially at me, but this woman looked straight at me like I was a person she was actually meeting.

"Hi. Sorry to bother you. Can I borrow that?" She pointed at the sandwich board that stood at the corner of my booth, the one that said SUTHERLAND FLORALS in painted letters. "I know it's yours and I'll bring it back, I swear. I need to write on the back of it. My dog got loose at the fairgrounds and I've got flyers but nobody reads flyers."

I looked at her hands while she talked, which is a habit I picked up in the first year after Melinda, because a wedding ring tells you something useful before a conversation gets going. No ring, no pale line where a ring had been, no ring on a chain around her neck. I am not proud of the habit but there it is. Her hands were steady and a little sunburned and there was ink on the side of one finger, like she had been writing the flyers with a marker an hour earlier.

"Take it," I said. "There's chalk in the booth. Write on the back and the rain will take it off tonight."

"It's not supposed to rain." She said it fast, already dragging the board around to her side, and then she stopped and looked at me again with that same direct look and something almost like a smile underneath it. "That was rude. Thank you. I'm Tara."

"Nikki. Sutherland. Same as the board."

"I figured." She picked up the chalk I handed her and crouched down to write on the back of it, and her handwriting came out big and crooked, LOST DOG, BROWN, ANSWERS TO BUDDY, and her phone number in digits she had to think about because she recited them under her breath as she wrote them. Then she stood and looked at the board and looked at the fair and I watched the arithmetic happen on her face, the arithmetic of one woman and two hundred acres of fairgrounds.

"I'll help you look," I heard myself say. "The judging isn't until two. Nobody needs flowers before a judging. Flowers just have to sit there and look good."

"You don't have to do that."

"I know." I came around the booth and picked up my keys. "But a lost dog at a fair is a two person job. One person watches the board and one person walks."

She didn't argue, which told me something about her right there. Some people argue on principle even when they want the help. She just nodded and picked up her flyers and we started walking, and I will state right here that I did not think of it as anything but helping, at that point. That is mostly true. There was a small part of me that had noticed the sunburn and the direct stare and the empty ring finger and had filed it somewhere without a label, but I have learned not to listen to small parts of myself, because they got me into trouble once and grief makes a poor wingman.

We walked the midway first, and she held flyers out to people and most people took them and a few read them right there and said no, haven't seen him, sorry. She thanked every single one of them by name after reading their name tags, which told me she was the kind of person who works a counter somewhere and does it well. A school bus dispatcher, she told me later, and I believed it, because dispatchers and florists are the same kind of people. We both spend our days keeping track of things that move.

We found the dog near the fuel dock, of all places, which is how Tara and I ended up standing at the edge of Shady Cove Lake at noon on a Saturday. A kid had tied Buddy's leash to a rail and the leash had slipped and the dog had spent an hour accepting food from strangers and was now lying flat in the shade of the fuel dock office like a rug that had given up on life. Tara made a sound I will not try to describe and the dog did not even lift his head, just thumped his tail twice against the boards.

"Well, he's alive." She crouched and took his face in her hands and the dog licked her chin. "Buddy, you absolute menace. You have no idea what kind of morning you've caused."

"I think he knows exactly." I said. "Look at him. He's comfortable. He's had hot dogs."

She laughed at that, really laughed, head back, and I remember thinking two things at once. The first was that I had not made anyone laugh like that in a long time, or maybe it was that nobody had laughed at something I said in a long time, which is a different thing and a worse one. The second thing I did not fully think, it was more of a pressure behind the ribs, and I pushed it down the way I had gotten good at pushing things down.

We were walking back toward the pavilion, me carrying the sandwich board and her carrying the dog, when the drunk man happened. He was one of those fair men, somewhere past fifty, straw hat, a plastic cup in his hand at noon, and when he saw the board under my arm he lit up like I was delivering his lost property.

"That's mine!" he said, and grabbed at the board. "That's my sign. Somebody took my sign off my truck."

"Sir, it says Sutherland Florals." I held it out of his reach.

"It did say that." He leaned in and squinted at the chalk on the back. "Lost dog. Well, hell. I lost a dog once. Nineteen eighty-something. Best dog I ever had."

Tara had turned around by then, and Buddy was watching the whole thing from her arms with the calm of a creature who has never once been in trouble in his life. Tara looked at me over the drunk man's shoulder and I looked back at her and neither of us said one word, and that was the moment, I can tell you now, that something shifted. It was nothing he said. It was the look, the shared look, the one where two strangers agree without speaking that a thing is funny and that each of them can see the other one sees it. I had not done that with anyone in three years. I had not let myself do it.

The man wandered off still holding his cup, and Tara and I walked the rest of the way to the pavilion, and at the corner of my booth she set the dog down and straightened up and looked at me with that direct stare again, and this time I looked back as long as she did.

"So," she said. "I owe you a sandwich or something. For the board. For the walking."

"You don't owe me anything."

"I'd like to, though." She said it simply, no performance in it, and then she glanced at the pavilion where the judging tables were going up. "You have your flower thing at two."

"I do." I said. "But it's over by four."

"I leave town tomorrow morning. Early." She said that part the way people say a thing they want heard plainly, no dressing on it, and I understood every word underneath it, and I understood that she was not asking anything yet either. She was just laying the facts on the table between us the way I lay stems out on a workbench, one by one, before deciding what goes in the vase.

"Then you should eat somewhere good tonight." I said. "Not the fair food."

"Yeah?" she said.

"Yeah," I said, and went to arrange my dahlias, and the next three hours of judging were the longest three hours of my August.

The judging ended at four, which I know because I watched the clock on the pavilion wall more than I watched the judges. I took a second place ribbon for the dahlia arrangement and a third for the zinnias, and a woman I see once a year told me my sunflowers were bold, and I said thank you, and the whole time some part of my brain was doing arithmetic about what time a person has to eat dinner and how early is early when someone says they leave in the morning.

I packed the van faster than I have ever packed it. I left the ribbon display to the fair people, who tape everything to a corkboard anyway, and I texted Tara from the driver's seat, because she had put her number on the back of my board and I had written mine on one of her flyers, which is a system that works better than it should. There is a steakhouse on the far side of the lake, the kind with vinyl booths and a fish tank, and I told her to meet me there at seven, and she texted back one word, done, and I sat in the van for a minute after that just holding the phone.

* * *

Dinner was two hours long and felt like forty minutes. She told me about dispatching buses, how the whole job is knowing which driver lies about being stuck in traffic and which one actually is, and I told her about the shop on Delmore Street, the walk-in cooler, the February people who buy roses and the August people who buy sympathy arrangements and how you learn to read both. She asked real questions. What I noticed most was that she asked questions and then listened to the answers like the answers were going somewhere.

Around the second round of iced tea she told me the rest of it, the parts she had skipped at the fair. She had a job offer in another state, a real one, dispatch office with windows, and she had spent two years half-deciding to leave and one week actually deciding. Her lease was up. The truck was mostly packed. Buddy was riding shotgun tomorrow whether he liked it or not. "So this is it," she said, and gestured at the vinyl booth, the fish tank, me. "This is my last night in town and I'm spending it with a woman who judged zinnias."

"Second place zinnias," I said.

"Second place zinnias," she agreed, and we clinked glasses on that, and underneath the joke there was the plain fact we had both been carrying since four o'clock. She was leaving. I was staying. Neither of us was stupid enough to pretend otherwise and neither of us wanted to.

So I said the thing I had been turning over since the pavilion. I said it the way I say hard things, straight out, before I can talk myself around it. "Then let's make tonight mean something. Not a maybe. Not a we should keep in touch. Just tonight, and we both know that's what it is."

She set her glass down and looked at me the way she had looked at me over the drunk man's shoulder, direct, no dressing on it. "You're sure?"

"I've been sure since noon," I said. "I've just been arranging dahlias about it."

That got the laugh again, head back, and I thought, there it is, the pressure behind the ribs, and this time I did not push it down. Three years is a long time to push things down. Melinda died in October and I did the math once, that I have now been a widow longer than I was a wife, and somewhere in those three years I had decided that wanting something was the same as risking something and I had quietly stopped wanting things. Sitting in that booth across from a woman who was leaving in twelve hours, I wanted something, and it turned out wanting is not the same as risking. Wanting is just wanting. The risk was always optional.

* * *

We walked it off, or tried to. The fair was still lit up behind the pavilion, all the rides running, the fryer smell drifting over the water, and we walked down past the pavilion to the fuel dock because she wanted to show Buddy the lake, which is a thing dog people say and mean. The dog trotted along the dock sniffing at the pilings with tremendous professional interest. The boats were tied up in rows, bobbing, the halyards tapping against the masts in that lazy evening sound, and the fair lights lay out on the water in long smears of red and yellow.

She stopped at the end of the dock and looked at the lights and then at me. "This is a good lake," she said, which was not what she meant and we both knew it.

"It's a good dock," I said.

"You're terrible at this," she said, grinning.

"I'm out of practice." And then, because I had decided to stop being careful, "You'd have to fix that."

"Well." She stepped closer. The dog sat down between us like an audience. "I'm only here one night."

"I know what I signed up for."

She kissed me then, or I kissed her, I have replayed it enough times that the memory won't hold still on who moved first, and it doesn't matter