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“Okay,” Marisa agreed, though Betsy could tell that she didn’t believe that. Then she added, “And I’ll say this about him. He must really know how to make money. An investment banker who’s now in tight with Futurium? A guy who’s going to be there when crypto becomes the coin that people use in Las Vegas? That’s cool.”
Betsy nodded. Yes, if there was one thing she believed about Frankie Limback, it was anthropologic: he was an alpha male who was an excellent provider.
* * *
The fairs at the end of August were the ones with the pumpkins that topped two thousand pounds. The ones the size of Volkswagen Beetles. But at a fair in central Vermont earlier in the month, Betsy and Marisa saw one that was fifteen hundred pounds, a massive and gnarly vegetable that had demanded a forklift to be brought into the agriculture barn.
“That would make a lot of pies,” Betsy observed.
“It would make zero pies,” Marisa corrected her. “That monster is, like, all fertilizer and chemicals.”
Betsy looked at the girl, once more surprised by the unexpected things that she knew. “Where did you learn that?”
“Near a place I lived for a while, there was a guy down the road who entered those weird giant vegetable competitions. His pumpkin patch began with lots of pumpkins, but got smaller and smaller as he weeded out the ones that weren’t going to win. He told us about all the stuff he fed the ones he was going to keep. The ones that might be giants.”
“Kind of like Linus Van Pelt’s pumpkin patch and waiting for the Great Pumpkin.”
“Who’s Linus Whatever?”
It didn’t break Betsy’s heart that Marisa didn’t know who Linus was, but the idea that she’d never seen the Peanuts Halloween special—or, clearly, A Charlie Brown Christmas—saddened her.
At all of the fairs, the two of them went on rides that Betsy hadn’t gone on in years, some of which left her world spinning, even after they’d exited back onto the grass, and one of which almost had her wanting to fall onto the ground and vomit on her hands and knees. She didn’t. But she did wonder, as she had often when she was in her twenties, how her sister—or anyone with bulimia—could do what she did.
They took more pictures for the social networks. Betsy liked the idea that these were photos of a mother and daughter together; she disliked the reality that the child was experiencing all of this with an adult, rather than with a squad of girls on the cusp of adolescence. With friends.
She told herself that Marisa would find her posse in Vegas. She would have friends and they would have money—real or crypto—and neither of them would worry about tomorrow. They were, like Americans for centuries, going west to make their fortune.
And she would be with her sister. Once they had been close; they might be again. Family mattered, even a family as fucked up as hers. Even a family that was down to the siblings.
At one of the county fairs, a deep molten stripe of a sunset between the mountains and the clouds in the distance, they noticed a carny in a black tank top with tattoo sleeves on his arms. He was running a harmless Tilt-a-Whirl, the sort of ride that wouldn’t leave Betsy green, and among his tats was a crown and what looked like a family crest or coat of arms with a pair of crossed swords.
“Look, Betsy,” Marisa joked. “Maybe that dude is a long-lost member of the British royal family.”
“Maybe,” Betsy agreed, but she supposed the tattoos were a Game of Thrones reference or had a cosplay backstory. He could have been thirty, and he could have been fifty: he was rail thin with a lined face and a ball cap from a Minor League baseball team.
“I met a guy at the Champlain Valley Fair last year who offered to tattoo me,” Marisa went on.
“I’m glad you said no.”
“How do you know I did?”
“I don’t.”
“No,” the girl said, and she smiled darkly. “You don’t.”
“So, Marisa…do you have a tattoo?”
She shook her head. “No. I’ll get one when I’m older and know more what I want.”
“That’s wise,” Betsy told her. She was relieved, but not because she disapproved of ink. She just hated the idea of some criminal pervert at a county fair tattooing an eleven- or twelve-year-old kid.
Marisa approached the carny with the crown on one of his arms, and Betsy trailed after her.
“I like your sleeves,” the girl said to him.
“Thanks.”
“My aunt is a princess.”
