The Fair Was Everywhere

Beverly Freeman is sixty-two years old, and she has been rehearsing this moment for thirty-five years, which is a long time to rehearse anything, even revenge.

The Freeman's Hollow County Fair has not changed much since she was twenty-seven. The same wooden stalls lean the same tired directions. The same Ferris wheel, standing since the fifties, turns its slow circle over the valley, and the same smell of frying dough and manure and cut grass drifts up from the midway. She came here every October of her young life. She came here with Geoff Brownlow for two of those years, his arm around her shoulders, his voice in her ear pointing out which of the prize pumpkins had been grown from seed he had personally pressed into Fred Ibarra's palm, because Geoff knew everybody and everybody knew Geoff, the fair's unofficial historian, the man who could tell you the year the produce tent burned and the year it was rebuilt and the name of the man who rebuilt it.

And then, one gray Tuesday in November, when she was twenty-seven and he was twenty-nine, he was gone. No note. No phone call. Nothing. His apartment emptied out overnight, as if he had dissolved into the soil, and Beverly spent the worst winter of her life staring at a telephone that never rang.

So now she stands at the pie contest booth with a Nikon hanging from her neck and a plan folded up tight in her chest, and she sees him, and her whole body forgets the plan for a second.

He is across the booth, behind the judging table, holding a slice of apple pie up to the light the way he always used to, checking the crust, and he has not aged a day. Not one single day. His hair is the same dark brown. His hands are the same long-fingered hands. He could walk out of the photograph she took of him in 1997 and nobody would blink. Beverly's knees do something complicated. She grips the booth's railing and breathes.

"You're still here," she says, and she does not mean to say it out loud, but it comes out anyway, flat and strange, and his head turns.

For a moment the whole fair goes quiet around her, the way a record pauses when the needle skips. Then the noise comes back, the announcer over the speakers, the kids shrieking at the ring toss, and Geoff Brownlow is looking at her with an expression she cannot read at all, and Beverly remembers why she came.

The plan flickers into focus. She will photograph him. She will document him. She will put together a series, candids, close-ups, the man in his little kingdom, and she will show it to everyone at the historical society meeting, everyone who still asks after him, and let them see what thirty-five years did to the man who could not even manage a goodbye. Tired. Ordinary. Shrunk. That was the story she would tell with the camera, the only language she had ever trusted.

Except he does not look tired. He does not look ordinary. He looks like her whole twenties standing behind a pie judging table.

She turns and walks away before he can cross the booth, because her hands are shaking and she needs Brie. Brie Wilton is fifty-five and holds court at the quilt display every year, and she finds her there exactly as expected, arguing cheerfully with a woman in a sunbonnet about whether double wedding ring counts as an heirloom pattern.

"Beverly! Oh, thank goodness, tell this woman I'm right and put her out of her misery."

"You're right," Beverly says, not having heard a word of the argument, and Brie's smile drops off her face immediately, because Brie has known her for twenty-five years, since a photography workshop when they were both younger and Brie was the only person in the room who laughed at Beverly's jokes, and she knows what a flat voice means.

"Okay." Brie takes her elbow and steers her toward the sycamores at the edge of the fairground, away from the crowds, under the trees where the noise softens into a wash. "Spill it. You've got the face. You've had the face since July when you heard the fair was coming, and now you've got the face plus your camera plus you're white as milk. What happened?"

"I saw him," Beverly says. "Geoff. Geoff Brownlow. He's here. He's judging pies, Brie, he's judging pies like he never left, like thirty-five years just... didn't happen to him."

Brie sits down slowly on the low stone wall that edges the tree line. "Geoff. The one who. The one that vanished."

"The one that vanished. Yes. And Brie, I came here with a plan, I'll admit it, I've had a plan since spring. I'm going to photograph him. A whole series. The Fair's Historian, I'm calling it, and I'm going to show everyone exactly what he turned out to be. Let the historical society see him. Let Fred Ibarra see him. Let everybody who thought he hung the moon see the shabby little man he became, and then maybe I can finally stop..." She stops. Her voice has wavered, right there at the end, wavered and cracked like a dropped plate, and she hates it.

Brie waits. Brie is very good at waiting.

"The way he used to laugh," Beverly says finally, staring down at her own hands on the camera strap. "That's the thing I can't get past, even now, even for the plan. He laughed from way down somewhere, you could feel it in his chest if you were leaning against him. And he'd tip his head back when something really got him, and his throat would... and he knew every tree in this valley by name, Brie, not the species, the name, he'd say hello to them like old friends, and I used to tease him about it and he'd just smile at me. And I'm supposed to photograph that man and call it evidence of something. I'm supposed to stand there with my camera and make him small." Her thumb finds the shutter wheel and turns it, a soft ratcheting click, click, an old habit, the sound her hands make when her mind is elsewhere. "He left me without a word. Two years, Brie. We were talking about a house. And he left me without one single word, and I have carried that around for thirty-five years like a stone in my boot, and I want... I wanted to..."

She trails off, because under the sycamores, past the stone wall, she can see the far edge of the fairground where the oaks start, the old deep valley oaks that have been there longer than the town, and one of them, the big one by the creek, seems almost to lean. It is a trick of the light. It is always a trick of the light. Geoff used to say that too, when she pointed it out. It's a trick of the light, Bev, and she would laugh and he would smile, and the tree would seem to settle, satisfied.

"And then I saw him and he hasn't aged," she says, quieter now. "Not a day. Not one. He looks exactly like he did at twenty-nine, Brie, and that's not possible, people don't do that, so either I'm losing my mind or something is very wrong with Geoff Brownlow, and I don't know which one I'm rooting for anymore."

Brie is quiet for a while. Somewhere behind them the Ferris wheel groans through another turn. "Maybe," Brie says at last, carefully, "you should just go talk to him. Not photograph him. Talk."

"Talk," Beverly repeats. "Thirty-five years of no word from him and I should talk."

"Well. Or follow him around all day with a camera and a grudge, which, honestly, honey, you've done harder things, but I don't know that it'll fix your boot stone."

Beverly laughs, a short surprised sound, and it costs her something to admit that Brie might be right. She lifts the camera and, out of pure reflex, frames the oaks by the creek. The big one fills the lens. Its bark in the viewfinder looks like something older than bark, ridged deep as carvings, and for half a second she thinks she sees letters in it, initials, the ghost of initials she once traced with her own fingertip on a dare.

She lowers the camera. Her heart is behaving badly.

"Fine," she says. "Talk first. Then photographs. A woman's allowed a fallback plan."

The fair is everywhere around her, all of it old, all of it tended, and none of it hers.

Beverly leaves Brie at the stone wall and walks back into the fair with her camera bumping her hip, and she does not go looking for Geoff, she tells herself, she is just going toward the lemonade stand because she is sixty-two years old and it is October and a person wants lemonade at a fair, that is all that is happening here. The stand is the same one that stood there when she was twenty-seven, same plank counter, same hand-painted sign with the lemons faded to a yellow so pale it looks like memory, and the woman working it is somebody's granddaughter, probably, somebody she doesn't know, because that is the thing about coming back to a place after thirty-five years, all the faces have been swapped out and the wood is the same wood.

She pays for her cup and stands there drinking it, the tart cold of it hitting her empty stomach, and that is when the fair goes quiet around her. Not actually quiet, the Ferris wheel still groans and somewhere a pig is complaining and the announcer is still mumbling about the tractor pull, but it goes quiet the way a room goes quiet when someone walks in that your body recognizes before your mind does. Her spine knows first. Her spine has always known first, that was true when she was twenty-seven and it is apparently still true at sixty-two, and she hates her spine a little for it.

"Miss Freeman."

Nobody has called her Miss Freeman in decades. She turns, and there he is, close enough that she can smell the fair on him, sawdust and frying oil and under it something else, something like turned earth after rain, something like night-blooming jasmine, and she wants to say, that's not a smell that belongs at a fair in the afternoon, that's a smell from a specific night in a specific year, why do you have it. She says nothing. Her hands are full of lemonade and camera and her mouth is full of nothing.

"You're back," Geoff says, tipping his head the way he always did, dark brown hair falling the same way it fell in 1997, hands the same long-fingered hands, and his voice is the same voice too, low and slow like something that has never once been in a hurry. "The fair missed you."

"The fair," Beverly manages. "The fair missed me."

"It does that. It keeps count. Things that grow keep count of everything, you know. Every winter. Every spring someone doesn't come back."

"You don't get to do that." Her voice comes out steadier than she expected and she holds onto that. "You don't get to stand there talking about springs and counting, Geoff, you don't get to be... folksy. You left. You know what you did, you know what that winter was, and now you're going to stand here and talk to me about seasons like we're two people at a fair."

He looks at her for a while, and she cannot read his face, which is new, because she used to be able to read his face across a room. "The roots go down farther than the hurt," he says, which is not an answer to anything, and then, "Will you walk with me a minute? There's something I'd rather say behind the livestock barn than here."

"Absolutely not," Beverly says, and then she is walking behind the livestock barn with him, and she would like the record to show that she said absolutely not, she said it out loud, and her feet simply did not listen, and she has decided not to examine that too closely because examining it feels like losing.