The Off-Season

My birthday is in three days, which is a thing I keep forgetting to mention to people, because nobody asks anymore. I keep sliding it forward in my head like maybe if I get it over with early I won't have to feel it happen.

Three days. I'll be twenty-four.

Here's the situation. I'm Hugo, I'm twenty-three for three more days, and I've been a widower for two years, which is a sentence I still can't say out loud without sounding like I'm reading it off a card. My husband Isaac died almost two years ago, in March. I was twenty when we got married, which everyone told us was young, and he was twenty-eight, and we had two years of marriage, and then one Tuesday in March I didn't have anything anymore.

I've been numb since then. That's the honest word for it. Not sad, exactly, or not only sad. Numb. Like somebody turned the color down on everything. I kept the job at the fairground because it was there and because it asked nothing of me. I sweep floors in a hall full of packed-away carnival booths and I go home and I sleep and I do it again. The fair closed after Halloween and now it's just me and the cold and about four acres of tarps and folded-up rides.

That Thursday I was doing my usual loop, checking the gate locks, when I saw the car.

It was a gray sedan, borrowed, I'd learn later, and it was sitting crooked near the main gate with the hazard lights going. And next to it was a guy I'd never seen before, standing in the December wind like it didn't concern him, holding what looked like a stone bowl and a little club.

"Are you grinding something?" I called, because that's what it looked like. He was grinding something.

He looked up. He was tall, maybe thirty, dark hair going gray early at the temples, wearing one of those puffy coats that make everybody look like a marshmallow. "I'm grinding a rock," he said. "Which sounds insane until you do geology for a living."

"I sweep floors for a living, so I can't really judge."

He smiled at that. He had a good smile, crooked. "My car died about a mile back and my phone's dead too, and I walked until I saw lights. This is a fairground, I assume?"

"Assume correctly. It's closed, though. Off-season. I'm the janitor."

"Hugo," I said, when he offered his hand. "And you are?"

"Bernard. I'm a seismologist. I'm up here checking fault lines for a state survey, and I rented this car from a guy in town who I'm now strongly considering suing." He held up the mortar and pestle. "This is from my sample kit. I was calming myself down by crushing a piece of gravel. It helps. Don't knock it."

"You want to come inside? It's about twelve degrees out here and I have a staff room with a coffee machine that works, mostly."

"That's the nicest offer I've had all month," he said. "And I mean that in a sad way about my month."

So we went inside. The main hall is this huge barn of a space, and in the winter it's all shut-down booths with canvas over them, and the air smells like cold metal and stale popcorn, and your breath hangs in front of you. I hit the lights and it went from pitch black to half dark, which is about what the wiring can manage.

Bernard stood in the middle of it with his hands in his pockets and turned in a slow circle. "This is kind of great," he said. "It's like a museum of a thing that's asleep."

"That's exactly what it is. Ferris wheel's out there under a tarp if you want to visit it. It gets lonely."

He laughed, a real laugh, and something in my chest moved for the first time in a while. Not a lot. Just a little, like a floorboard settling. I noticed it and didn't know what to do about it, so I did nothing, which is my specialty.

We got to the staff room and I made coffee on the old machine while he sat on the counter, which I let him do because he was the first company I'd had in that room since October. He talked while it brewed. He told me he goes all over the state planting little sensors and hitting the ground with a hammer and listening to what comes back, which is a real job, he swore, and that he'd been at it six years since finishing his degree.

"Six years of small towns and rental cars," he said. "I like it, mostly. It's quiet work. You spend a lot of time alone with a hammer and your thoughts."

"That sounds either great or terrible."

"Depends on the thoughts." He looked at me over the coffee cup. "What's your story? Nobody ends up janitor of a sleeping fairground by accident."

And there it was, the question I get maybe once a month from somebody, usually a neighbor meaning well. I could've given him the short version. I gave him most of the real one, which surprised me.

"I was married," I said. "My husband died two years ago. Car accident. I took this job because I already had it part time and it didn't require me to talk to anyone, and I just never left."

Bernard didn't do the face people do, the quick wince and the pivot to a new subject. He just nodded and held his coffee with both hands and said, "Two years is nothing and forever at the same time. My dad went six years back and I still can't predict which kind of day I'll get."

"Yeah," I said. "That's it exactly."

We sat there and drank coffee in a half-dark hall in the middle of nowhere, and I want to be careful how I say this next part because it matters. It wasn't a spark or a lightning bolt or any of that. It was more like the color coming back a little. Like I noticed he had good hands, and I noticed I was talking with my whole face, and I noticed that when he asked me a question I actually wanted to answer it.

He said something about how long the tow would take. I said the tow guy in town doesn't work past four and it was already three-thirty. He said, "So I'm stuck."

"Looks like it. There's a motel half a mile up the road. Or you could wait in here while I finish my rounds. It's warmer than your dead car."

"Or," he said, and he paused, and he looked at me the way you look at someone when you're checking before you jump, "you could finish your rounds and I could come with you. I've never seen the guts of a Ferris wheel and I find I don't want this afternoon to end yet."

Neither did I. I didn't say that. I said, "Yeah, okay. It's a lot of walking."

"I do a lot of walking," Bernard said, and hopped down off the counter, and followed me out into the cold.

We walked the grounds first, because I'm a man of my word even when I'd rather not be. I showed him the funnel cake stand with its windows boarded up, and the ticket booth where Old Sal used to work, and he asked good questions, the kind where you can tell someone actually listens to the answers. He pointed at the tarp lump out on the frozen grass and said, "So that's her," like the Ferris wheel was a sleeping animal, and I said, "That's her," and he nodded like we'd agreed on something important.

Halfway through my rounds he said it. Just said it, no wind-up.

"Can I ask you something kind of forward?"

"Sure."

"Are you single? And I'm asking for a reason, so you don't have to answer if you'd rather not."

I stood there with a wrench in my hand, next to a generator I'd already checked twice, and thought about how long it had been since anybody asked me that. Two years, basically. Isaac had been gone two years, and before that I'd been with him since I was nineteen, so the question had gathered dust.

"Yeah," I said. "I'm single."

That's all I said. I didn't give him the two years, the Tuesday in March, any of it. I'd already given him the story once and I figured he could do the math if he wanted.