The Fair-Weather Game

The fair again. Forty-six years old and I'd been coming to the Harlow County Fair since I was twenty-two, which is twenty-four years of the same lemonade stands.

My sister Katrina had a honey booth near the livestock barns. Same spot every year. Same sun hat. Same speech about how the bees this year were "really something." I bought two jars before she'd even finished saying hello.

"You look like a woman who needs to win a stuffed animal," she said, handing me my change.

"I look like a woman who needs a nap."

"Go walk around. Look at things. Flirt with somebody."

Katrina is thirty-eight and cheerful the way only people with chickens and a good marriage can be cheerful. I told her I'd flirted plenty, thanks, and we both knew that was a lie.

Here's my last three years, briefly. There was Bryce, whom I met at a bar in Pendleton, who spent forty minutes explaining his fantasy football league. There was the guy from the app whose profile said "adventurous" and whose actual idea of adventure was a different burger place. And there was Alan, who was nice, genuinely nice, and who I had nothing to say to for two straight hours except comments about the weather. I'm a pilot instructor. I talk about weather professionally. Even I was bored.

So. A Saturday in August, dusty fairground, funnel cake smell everywhere, and me walking the midway alone like some kind of carnival ghost.

* * *

The couples were the worst part. Everywhere I looked, couples. Holding hands over corn dogs. Arguing about which lemonade stand. A man in a feed cap letting his wife rest her head on his shoulder while the demolition derby droned through the speakers. All of it so easy for them. All of it looking so effortless and I wanted to be annoyed by it and instead I just felt... hungry, I guess. Not for food.

I ended up at one of those prize-catch games. You know the type. Little floating ducks, a grid of them, you toss a ping pong ball and win whatever number is under your duck. A hand-lettered sign said THREE BALLS FOR FIVE BUCKS.

The kid running it was maybe twenty-nine, checking his phone, clearly counting the minutes until his shift ended.

"One bucket, please," I said, digging out my wallet.

He passed it over without looking up. Fine. I respect a man committed to his boredom. Solidarity, even.

I tossed the first ball. Missed. The second one clipped a duck's head and spun off. The third one, I swear, was going to land right on the twenty-five, the big prize, the enormous purple bear nobody on earth needs.

And then another ball hit it. From my left. Same duck. The balls knocked together mid-air like the whole thing had been choreographed, and they both bounced off in different directions, and the duck bobbed there, unbothered, smug.

"Oh, come on," I said.

"Sorry. Sorry." A man was already stepping up beside me, hands half-raised. "That was, that was supposed to be mine, I've been working up the nerve to throw at that thing for twenty minutes."

"I've been working up the nerve for two minutes and it was going better."

He laughed. He was tall, maybe fifty, weathered in the way contractors get weathered, forearms like he'd carried a lot of lumber and hadn't once regretted it. Gray coming into his beard. Nice eyes. I noticed the eyes second, actually. First thing I noticed was that he'd apologized like he meant it, which put him ahead of Bryce by a full length.

"Uncle Sean," the kid at the booth called. "You're not supposed to be playing your own booth, man, that's like, against the rules of decency."

"It's my brother's booth. I don't work it, I just loiter near it."

"It's my dad's booth," the kid told me, like this settled something. His name tag said LUTHER.

"So you're disqualified," I said. "Which means the twenty-five is mine."

"It means we have to settle it," he said. He fished a five out of his pocket and set it on the counter. "Two buckets. Winner takes the bear."

"And the loser?"

"The loser buys the funnel cake."

"You drive a hard bargain, Sean," Luther said, reading the name tag situation before I could, the little snitch.

"Shay," I said, offering my hand.

We shook. His grip was warm and unhurried. He didn't do the thing where men squeeze your hand like they're submitting a job application. Just held it a second longer than the transaction required and let go.

We each threw. He missed. I missed. He hit a seven, I hit an eleven, we both agreed without discussion that the low numbers didn't count and the bear was still in play.

"Okay," he said, ball in hand, looking down the row of ducks like a man reading a green. "Watch this."

He hit the twenty-five dead center. The duck spun, the number faced up, Luther groaned like his own team had fumbled.

"That's my nephew," Sean said, nodding at Luther. "Sorry. He's dramatic."

"It's fine, it's fine," Luther said, though it plainly wasn't, and he went back to his phone.

I threw my last ball. It hit the edge of the twenty-five and ricocheted onto a nineteen. Small pink bear. Whatever.

"Fair and square," Sean said. Then, to Luther: "Give the lady the purple monstrosity."

"You give her the purple monstrosity, you won it."

"She was here first. Roughly."

They were still arguing about this when I took the bear myself, mostly to end it, and it was bigger than I'd estimated, nearly as tall as my torso, and immediately ridiculous. A woman walking past did the little laugh people do when they're glad they're not you.

"So," Sean said. "Funnel cake. Since technically I lost the tiebreaker we never agreed on."

"Technically you won."

"Technically I'd like to buy you funnel cake, is what I'm saying."

And here is where I did the thing. The whim thing. The thing I will defend to this day as the single best decision of my summer.

I looked at him over that stupid purple bear and I said, "You know what this looks like, right? Two old flames, meeting at the fair after all these years. Fighting over the same duck. It's practically a movie."

He paused with his wallet half out.

"That's what it looks like?"

"That's exactly what it looks like. To everybody watching."

Luther, without looking up: "It's kind of what it looks like."

"See? Your nephew agrees."

Sean studied me for a second. Then he grinned, this slow, genuine grin that reached all the way up and rearranged his whole face, and I understood that he was the kind of man who'd been handsome his whole life and had only recently gotten comfortable about it.

"Okay," he said. "Old flames. How long were we together?"

"Three years. Broke up because I moved for work."

"Am I still angry about it?"

"Furious. You wrote me letters."

"I would absolutely write letters. Do we shake hands at the end of this or hug?"

"That's up to how the funnel cake goes."

He laughed again and we walked toward the cake stand, and the bear went between us like a chaperone neither of us had asked for.

"This is insane," he said. "I love it. Okay. What do I call you? Besides Shay."

"Shay. You're Sean. We met at, hmm."

"Sale barn dance."

"Nobody's met anyone at a sale barn dance."

"You haven't been to the right sale barn dance."

"Fine. Sale barn dance, 2019. We were together three years. You built things. I flew planes."

"See, that's good," he said. "That's believable. I do build things."

"You're a contractor?"

"Since I was twenty-five. Small crew. Mostly barns and decks and the occasional desperate remodel." He handed the vendor a ten and took the powdered-sugar catastrophe that resulted. "Careful, this thing fights back."

He was right. It did fight back. Powdered sugar everywhere, on my shirt, on the bear, on him. I was laughing before I could stop myself, actual laughing, the loud kind, and he was laughing too, and somewhere in there I stopped performing the joke and started just enjoying the company.

"So," he said, dusting sugar off his forearm. "Real question. How long do we keep this up?"

"Until one of us breaks character."

"Fair warning, I'm stubborn."

"Fair warning, so am I."

We found a bench by the 4-H pavilion, out of the foot traffic, and sat with the bear wedged between us. He asked questions like an actual old flame would. Did I still hate cilantro. Had I ever fixed the porch light, which apparently was a whole saga in our invented marriage. I made up a story about him falling off a roof in 2021 and he corrected me with details, that it was a ladder, that it was raining, that his brother had filmed it.

"You've thought about this too much," I said.

"I'm a contractor. We're liars by trade. We tell people their bathroom will take two weeks."

Behind us, the Ferris wheel lights came on all at once as the sun went down. He watched me watching them.

"You want to go on that," he said. Not a question.

"I want to go on that."

"In character or out of it?"

I thought about that one honestly.

"Ask me again at the top," I said.

He looked at me a beat longer than the joke required. Then he stood, brushed sugar off his jeans, and held out his hand like a man at a square dance.

"Ma'am."

"Sean. We've been together three years. Drop the ma'am."

"Old habits. From before we broke up."

The bear was a logistics problem. The Ferris wheel operator, a bored teenager with a clip-on tie, took one look at it and said no chance, but he'd hold it. He set it beside his stool, where it sat grinning its giant stitched grin at the ticket line. I felt weirdly naked without it. That bear had been holding my powder-sugared shirtfront together, emotionally speaking.

The car was old and swayed when we stepped in. Sean sat across from me, knees at an angle because he was a tall man in a box built for four teenagers, and the gate clanged shut, and up we went.

"Okay," he said. "Top's coming. Get your story straight."

"Get mine straight? You're the one with the ladder incident."

"That was real. I fell off a ladder in 2021. Rain, brother filming, all of it. You just stole it."

"Old flames borrow."

The fair shrank under us. The midway went from noise to a sort of warm hum, and the lights of the wheel threw orange across his face every half rotation. Somewhere below, Katrina was selling honey to people who'd buy anything after two beers. I'd have to explain Sean to her eventually. Or, better, never.

"Lake," he said suddenly.

"What?"

"Our meeting. You hated the sale barn dance. I could tell. You looked like you were doing a favor to the whole county." He leaned back against the swaying wall. "So change it. We met at a lake. Wallowa. Some cousin's cabin thing you got dragged to."

"Wallowa Lake. June. 2019."

"You had a red swimsuit."

"Did I?"

"You did. I remember it because you swam out farther than anyone and I thought, either that woman's a strong swimmer or she's trying to escape her own party. Turned out both."

I laughed. It came out easy, which annoyed me a little, how easy.

"Remember when," he said, "we took that canoe out at midnight and you made me paddle the whole way because you said your arms were for flying, not rowing."

"I did not say that."

"You absolutely did. You said, quote, I don't propel things, I pilot them. Worst line I ever heard. I kept paddling anyway."

"That's because you were in love with me."

"That's because my brother had the truck keys and I figured the canoe was faster than walking back."

We were climbing into the last of the ascent, the whole fairground laid out flat and lit, the livestock barns, Katrina's little booth glowing yellow at the edge of them, the Ferris wheel's shadow swinging over the dust like a clock hand. I could pick out our bench. Our funnel cake crumbs. Luther, probably restocking ping pong balls and thinking about his phone.

"Remember when," I said, taking my turn now, "you drove me to the airport at four in the morning just to watch me take off."

Sean went quiet a second. "That's a good one."

"It is. I invented it just now and I'm proud of it."

"You flew out of where?"

"Pendleton. Little commuter thing. You stood in the empty terminal with a gas station coffee and watched the whole plane leave, and then you drove home and fixed my porch light, which was still broken, because you're the kind of man who finishes someone else's project after they're gone."

The car tipped over the top of the wheel and hung there. The operator down below had a lever and no hurry about it, so we dangled. Sean looked out over the fair and didn't say anything for a while, and I let him, because the view was doing a lot of the talking.

"Here's my problem," he said finally.

"Problem."

"With the game. The old flames game." He turned the paper coffee cup he'd apparently been carrying this whole time, I never saw him drink it. "I keep making up details that are too good. The red swimsuit. The airport. I'm building a guy I wish I'd been, with a woman I wish I'd known."

"Well. That's the game."

"I know. It's just." He stopped, started again. "I'm fifty-two. I've built maybe two hundred decks. I'm good company, I'm told, and my last relationship ended two years ago, so politely it barely counts as a breakup, and I can't remember the last time an evening went somewhere I didn't plan." He looked at me then, straight on, no grin. "I don't want to be your old flame, Shay. I'd like to be your new one. That is the entire speech. I've been drafting it since the funnel cake."

The car lurched and started its descent. I watched the fair spin up toward us, the lights, the dust, the ducks floating in their little grid waiting for someone to throw at them.

"That speech was pretty good," I said.

"I had a long ride up."

"For the record, I'm forty-six, I teach people to fly, and my last three years of dating included a fantasy