Jason looked out across the overgrown front lawn. “And then he had me switch to purple paint. To hide the rust better. Because it was apparently worse than he’d realized.”
“Maybe he just—”
“And I did it,” Jason interrupted me. “I just went ahead and painted that ride even though I knew full well that that whole car beneath the rust could easily come flying off and kill whoever was riding it.”
Jason shook his head. I felt a tightening sensation in my shoulders and a general feeling of dread similar to what I’d felt under the covers the other night.
“I dragged my feet on posting the sale to the end of the summer. I kept coming up with reasons I couldn’t sell the Yo-Yo. That the secondhand-ride site was down. I didn’t have all the paperwork. Eventually, it was too late for me to sell it. Thank God.”
“And then my first week back at Syracuse I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” he said. “So I texted Chris and told him about it. I said, Don’t let my dad sell that ride. I made it sound like it was my fault, my doing. Like Dad didn’t know about the rust. And I guess maybe Dad just didn’t understand the seriousness of it, since he didn’t see it for himself.”
“Was that the main reason you didn’t come back this summer?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” Jason rubbed his eyes. “I just couldn’t believe I’d actually done that. That I’d almost let Dad sell it. That I could’ve killed someone because I couldn’t say no. And there was also this feeling like, I’ve got to get out of here before something goes really wrong with this whole Fabuland thing. Because the way Dad cuts corners and ‘forgets’ the rules sometimes, Ivy, I just can’t help but feel like there’s gonna be a disaster someday. Maybe not now, but someday.”
Emoji came up and twined around my legs. Jason reached out to pet her. I was grateful for her presence because it filled the silence a little, buying me a minute to decide what to think. Or at least what to say.
“And I got tired of hearing that it was all because I didn’t think like a businessperson. That I didn’t see the bigger picture. When he was the one who didn’t seem to understand how bad the rust was.”
“Maybe you should’ve taken a picture of it and shown it to him,” I offered. Our dad was a “seeing is believing” kind of guy. And remembering that seemed to loosen the tension that had been building in my shoulders.
“Yeah, maybe,” Jason muttered. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of that. I just ended up feeling like the inadequate one in the whole situation. Not being able to talk to Dad about it effectively myself. Painting the ride anyway. Making Chris have the hard conversation with Dad.”
I thought about his words for a moment. For some reason the word inadequate popped out at me.
“Do you remember Dad ever saying something like, ‘I’ve always known you wanted to stay small’? Do those words ring a bell?”
Jason scratched Emoji vigorously behind the ears. She made some weird satisfied noises with her tongue.
“Did you hear the question?” I asked.
“Yeah. Umm…Dad used to say it to Mom.”
“Not to you or to me?” I didn’t have time to hide the surprise in my voice.
“No.” Jason scowled. “Why would he say it to us?”
“Like, ‘Don’t ever grow up.’ Or, like, ‘You don’t seem like you ever want to grow up.’ ”
“No,” said Jason. “He used to say that to Mom when she started going to night school, to get her teaching certification.”
“So he never said it to me or you?”
I felt I had to ask it again to make sure. The words had felt so ingrained in my memory as something that was meant for me.
“Well…not that I remember. Has he started saying it to you?”
“Uh…no.” I paused. “I was just trying to remember it better.”
“Right. Along with the couch cushion fort. Probably because they happened around the same time. That’s what Mom and Dad always fought about. Her staying out late for her classes and being at the library. He didn’t ever want her to do that program. That was the beginning of the end for them, you know?”
“So what did that mean…her wanting to stay small?” I asked. “Like she wanted to go back to kindergarten?”
“Oh, you know…that was when Dad was really growing the business, opening several different branches at once. He wanted her to be his business partner, to really go for it with him. And what she wanted to do was be a kindergarten teacher. Like he was going ‘big-time,’ and she was doing the reverse, going ‘small-time.’ In Dad’s view, anyway. They fought about it all the time.”
I closed my eyes. Yes, that sounded right.
I’ve always known you wanted to stay small, honey. I’ve always known that about you.
It was a mean thing to say. I couldn’t really remember what our mom used to say in response. Maybe because she spoke so much softer than him. Maybe because she didn’t argue so much as deflect.
“This was all while you were in elementary school,” Jason said. “Dad thought Mom’s going back to school meant she didn’t really believe in Cork’s Doughnut Dynasty anymore, or believe in the goals they’d talked about, to make it a much bigger enterprise.”
“Right,” I said softly.
I remembered them always fighting when I was in the first or second grade. I didn’t remember the content. I probably had never really digested the content, actually.
“I guess it can be hard to think someone has stopped believing in you,” I said.
“I guess,” Jason admitted. “That’s one way of looking at it. Look, I’m kind of hungry. I’m going inside.”
I followed him into the house.
* * *
• • •
We didn’t talk much more that night. Jason got a text from Dad asking him to mow the lawn, so he was outside doing that as the sun set.
I watched TV and tried to go to bed early but couldn’t sleep. Eventually, I turned the air conditioner off and opened the window by my bed. Sometimes I preferred to listen to crickets on a summer night. Even when I was six years old I felt that way—that it was better to be hot with the crickets than to be at the perfect temperature with the guttural noise of a machine in your ears.
I closed my eyes. The crickets persisted for what seemed like hours. When they finally faded in my ears, a zooming sound replaced them. Like a car was whizzing by both my ears. I opened my eyes to see there were no cars. I was strapped into a seat. Morgan was beside me. She was screaming—but in a genuinely scared way, not in a fun way like last summer. Before I could figure out where we were, the ground had smacked into us. We lay broken on the concrete.
I sat up with a gasp. It took me a minute to catch my breath. The crickets started again, helping slow my heartbeat but not staving off the realization of where Morgan and I had been in the dream. We were in the Yo-Yo together. And it had come apart, flinging us both to the ground.
When my legs felt firm enough, I got out of bed and stumbled to my father’s bedroom door.
“Dad?” I whispered, tapping the door and then opening it slightly.
I saw with relief that he was in bed. He hadn’t spent another night on his office couch, obsessing about doughnut measurements or the exact right color of frosting or bleacher rentals.
I could hear him breathing in his sleep. He was probably exhausted from these last few days. This whole summer, even. It wouldn’t be fair to wake him up now to ask about what Jason had said about the Yo-Yo. Nor would it be smart. Jason might wake up and hear me, and he and Dad might argue. And I kind of knew what our dad would say anyway.
I thought the ride was fine. I didn’t know there was any rust. I took it out of service as soon as Jason told me. Why do you think it’s sitting unused behind the parking lot?
And that would sound reasonable to me, w
ouldn’t it? Because, as Katy had pointed out, sometimes Jason wanted to see things from his side. I understood that. We were all like that sometimes. And now wasn’t the right time to make an issue of this either way. The Yo-Yo was last summer’s concern. We all had other things to worry about right now.
I went back to my room and let the crickets sing me back to sleep.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Dad was already gone when I woke up. But my phone was full of text requests from him.
Hey Ivy. Some final social media ideas for today. $1 hot dogs tomorrow between one and two o’clock and free burgers for early birds (arrive between 9 and 9:30, get a voucher).
Delicious pics to go with those reminders, too! Be creative.
Then tonight, pics of the bleachers being set up?
Remember: Final calls to any contacts who haven’t already committed to sending someone.
Jason was still asleep. I wondered if he had received a similar list, but didn’t awaken him to ask. I drove to Fabuland alone and parked in the customer lot so I wouldn’t have to look at the two retired rides.
Since my dad hadn’t said anything about cotton candy duty, I didn’t go to my station. Instead, I strolled around the park taking pictures.
It was actually nice—if a little surreal—to be back at Fabuland after a few days away. I wasn’t sure if it was the bright morning sunshine or the new coats of paint in unexpected places—like the entrance to the bumper cars, or the front door of the administration building—that made the place seem to pop and sparkle.
Nobody was at the carousel yet. I took a picture of a particularly eager, openmouthed horse, making a mental note to find a doughnut later in the afternoon and snap a picture of the same horse with a doughnut in its mouth.
Inspired, I started staging more photos to post on today’s feeds.
I started with a pile of economy-size boxes of confectioners’ sugar in the back room of the pavilion, with a giant see-through tub of sprinkles on top of the pile and a set of metal mixing tubs beside it.
We can’t wait to mix up a few pounds of perfect pink frosting tonight! I typed as a draft caption for the photo. I wasn’t certain my dad had settled on pink. And surely it was being mixed up in the morning, not the night before, but that didn’t sound as exciting as an all-nighter kind of process.
After a couple more photos, the park was open, and I realized I was kind of starving from going a couple of days without eating much. As I neared the main fried dough stand, I could smell it. And for the first time since the beginning of the summer, it actually smelled good to me. Irresistible, even.
I was surprised to see Winnie tending the stand. I’d have thought my dad would have her at one of her more important posts, or helping with preparations for tomorrow. But then, the practice doughnut was finished, and the most frenetic of preparations probably wouldn’t start until after closing tonight.
Winnie already had two customers as I approached slowly, weighing my hunger against the awkwardness of encountering her again. A girl who looked to be about seven was standing at the counter with her mom, shaking a pile of powdered sugar onto her dough. It was taking her forever. Those sugar shakers have tiny holes so people will give up before they end up taking all the sugar.
Winnie was handing change to the mom.
“It’s sooo good with a coffee in the morning,” she was saying. “Enjoy it.”
“Just once. Just once a summer,” the mom was saying.
“I’m not telling anyone, don’t worry.” Winnie laughed and winked at the mom.
Why couldn’t I be like that with customers? So flirty and so natural? No wonder my dad put Winnie on so many of his “important” jobs.
I watched the mom and daughter walk away from the stand. Winnie tidied the counter, wiping it and then lining up the cinnamon and sugar shakers. Then she stretched her back and cracked her neck.
Winnie looked up and out and caught me looking at her. She stared at me for a moment. Then she folded her arms.
“Did you need something, Ivy?” she called.
“Umm.” I turned my head this way and that, as if there might be another Ivy standing on either side of me.
She gazed at me with her gray-lidded, heavily lashed eyes.
“You okay?” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m gonna have one piece of fried dough, please. No special topping.”
Winnie nodded and put a flap of dough into the fryer behind the counter.
“Since we’ve got a second,” I said, “I just wanted to apologize. I didn’t get a chance to at the hospital. I’m sorry about the Ethan stuff. The seizures. I didn’t know. I didn’t mean to force the subject.”
“You don’t really need to apologize. If you’re still worried about whatever Zach said, you can just forget it. He sometimes doesn’t think before he opens his mouth.”
“I guess I was trying to help Morgan. It probably sounds dumb now, but…she had questions and I thought I was being a good friend by asking them. I wasn’t thinking enough about how it might be…hurtful.”
Winnie didn’t reply. Instead, she turned around and fished my dough out of the fryer with metal tongs. She slapped it expertly onto a paper plate, then turned to shove the plate in my direction. Something about her movements reminded me of the day of the Princess Parade. The stray pendant necklace that had hit Chris in the head.
“Do you want butter on that?” she asked.
I hadn’t thought a great deal about that day for about a week now. The surprise on Chris’s face. My dad bent over right after it happened.
Winnie picked up a greasy brush from the counter and poised it over the metal vat of butter. I tried to process her simple question. But my mind was tied up in a distracting thought.
Maybe my dad had ducked.
And that thought—along with my vague annoyance at Winnie for not acknowledging the heartfelt things I was trying to say—pushed my next question out of my mouth.
“I have your recorder, by the way. Would you like it back?”
Winnie’s gaze shot up and she gave me a look I didn’t understand. Like at the hospital, I was surprised that it wasn’t exactly angry.
“I…um” was all she said.
“Is that a yes?” I said. “I don’t have it with me right now. But I can get it back to you if it’s yours.”
Winnie tapped the brush against the counter, her mouth slack and noncommittal.
“You didn’t say if you wanted butter or not,” she said, making pointed eye contact, not blinking.
“Sure.” I stared back at her. “Go for it.”
Winnie brushed the dough quickly. As she did it, my phone vibrated. I glanced at it. My dad had texted: WHY IS NO ONE AT THE COTTON CANDY STAND? I sighed and put the phone back in my pocket. Winnie pushed the dough over to me, little yellow rivers separating its big puffy bubbles.
“You really do care about Morgan, don’t you?” Winnie asked, still studying me.
“Yeah,” I said, resignedly shaking cinnamon sugar onto my outrageously unhealthy breakfast. “I do.”
“Does she talk to you anymore? Have you spoken in the last couple of weeks?”
I put down the cinnamon sugar shaker. I wondered if these questions were designed to distract me from the one I had asked her. Which she hadn’t answered.
“Why were you recording my dad’s office?” I asked.
I wondered how long we could go on like this, actively ignoring each other’s words.
“I think I know why,” Winnie said slowly. “And it doesn’t have all that much to do with Ethan.”
“Wait. Then…why?”
I’d broken first. Because Morgan was, of course, my soft spot.
“If you really want to know, I have something to show you,” Winnie said, lowering her voice.
As she sa
id it, two guys came up behind me. They were about my age, and engaged in very profound conversation:
“Dude, I don’t want Bavarian cream topping. That’s too much.”
“Well, then we can’t split one. It’s my favorite way to do it and I only get to have this, like, once a year.”
“It’s on my laptop,” Winnie hurried to say. “Do you know where my house is?”
I shook my head.
“It’s Fifty-Six Hauser Street. Not far from Morgan’s. Can you come after six?”
“Yeah,” I said, and then Winnie turned her attention to the customers.
I went back to my cotton candy. And I stayed there most of the day, watching the clock and conducting the last few bits of doughnut media business on my cracked phone. I posted a couple of Dad’s promotions, one photo, and answered a last confirmation email from Channel 12 News. My dad was being a little too annoying to deserve this extra media surprise, in my opinion. But he was going to get it anyway.
* * *
• • •
The Malloys’ house was a small one-story ranch the color of pistachio ice cream, its yard surrounded by a cyclone fence and covered with clover. As I looked at it from my car, I had a passing thought that it resembled a house leprechauns would live in. The word lucky passed through my head, but I shook it away. I didn’t think of myself as being lucky, but I didn’t think it of Winnie Malloy either.
Winnie opened the front door before I got to it. She must have seen me parking.
“Is your brother here too?” I asked.
Winnie shook her head. “No. He’s working his deli counter shift. And my mom’s out with her boyfriend. So nobody else will hear.”
Hear what? I thought as she led me into the kitchen, which smelled like someone had recently been frying bacon. It was a pleasant room, though, with a long windowsill decorated with colorful little teapots.
“I’m glad you came right at six,” Winnie said. “I’m supposed to go see Reggie in a little bit, and I was afraid you’d come late and I’d have to miss out.”
She had a laptop set up on the kitchen table, and I tried not to act too self-conscious at the mention of Reggie’s name.
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