by Beth Nugent
—Hey, he says, —it’s getting worse.
—Please, she says, taking his arm. Machine oil coats the stiff cloth of his shirt and she can feel the hard knobby bone of his elbow. He looks at her and she almost expects him to smile and say, Hey, I have kids at home, or, Yeah, I remember what it’s like to be a kid, but he looks quickly down her body, then up to her face and grins at her; then again he looks down, more slowly this time, bolder, realizing she has given him permission to do this in exchange for the ride.
—Okay, he says to the kids, —but hurry, and they run to the ride, and stand in front of it, choosing their cars. Each is modeled after a real car; they are all convertibles, but one or two have Cadillac fins, another is round and humped like a Volkswagen bug, and there are several racy sports cars.
—Hey, he says, —hurry, and each child goes to the nearest car, climbs in, and ties the seat belt. —Okay, he says, and the children look at him as they wait, holding tight to the wheels of their cars, wondering how long he will let them ride.
When he pulls the lever and the cars jerk to a start, they stare straight ahead expectantly. The rain picks up, and Anne moves back, under the awning of the petting zoo, where men are beginning to dismantle the pens. Terry turns to say something to her, then looks around; when he spots her under the awning, he looks annoyed a moment, then grins. She smiles unwillingly, and thinks of the drive home, of the life ahead of her. She wonders if David will want to stop at all the rest stops again, and if he will notice anything different when they pass through Cincinnati. She wonders how old he will be when he finally goes bald, where he will be living, with whom. She wonders what his life will be like without her, if he will be lonely, if he will wonder where she is and what she is doing.
A sudden pull at her elbow startles her, and she looks down to see a goat nibbling on the sleeve of her shirt. She pulls her arm away, and the goat looks mildly up at her, then turns and shuffles back across to the corner of its cage. As she watches it nose through the sawdust for any dropped pellets of food, she realizes suddenly that David’s life will be just as it is now, only without her: a peaceful series of mild joys and mild disappointments, an equanimous acceptance of blows that—like the one she herself is about to deal him—will never come close enough to do much damage. Leaving him, she understands, will not matter to him in the way she had thought; he will not take it personally, and he will let her go without rancor. The thought of it leaves her unsettled, somehow slighted, and even though it is she who is leaving, she feels suddenly abandoned.
She inhales sharply, breathing in the oil and dust and rain, and knows that when she remembers this trip, it is this moment–not anything that happened in Cleveland or Columbus or Cincinnati–but this moment that she will remember: the touch of Terry’s stiff oily shirt between her fingers, the animals snorting uneasily as their pens come down around them, and the children going slowly around the track while rain streams down on their small heads, their faces set in grim determined joy but their hearts already gone numb.
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