I look at the kitchen. This kitchen, which I’ve been in more times in three weeks than I was in my own kitchen in the last two years of my previous life, which hasbecome as legible to me as my own face.
“Tristan,” I say.
“Mm.”
“Thank you. For…” I stop. The everything is too big for a sentence. “For the food. All of it.”
He turns to look at me. “You don’t have to thank me for that.”
“I know I don’t have to.” I hold his gaze. “I want to.”
“You’re welcome,” he says.
Jack appears at nine with an observation about the post-carnival stall breakdown that I am fairly certain is a pretext. We go back to the carnival ground to check it, and the pretext turns out to be partially real—there is a thing that needs checking, we check it—and then we sit on the edge of the dismantled ring toss frame in the morning sun and do nothing purposeful for forty-five minutes.
I don’t have a history of doing nothing purposeful. Purposeful is my resting state. Motion is my resting state. The forward momentum, the next move, the always-oriented-toward-something.
I sit on the ring toss frame and do nothing purposeful.
Jack talks. This is his resting state, and I’ve stopped filtering it for information and started just listening. His stories are good. His observations are sharp under the playful surface and I’ve stopped being surprised by the sharpness.
He tells me about the carnival circuit. The three years, the different towns. The loneliness of it that he’s describing for the first time. I can hear that it’s the first time, the careful way of someone putting words around something they haven’t put words around before.
“Did you miss it?” I ask. “When you stopped?”
“The circuit?”
“The moving.”
He thinks about it seriously. “No. I missed the idea of it. The freedom I’d been telling myself it was.” A pause. “The actual thing I don’t miss.”
I look at the dismantled ring toss frame. At the top shelf where the trophy lives—or lived, it’s still in my pocket, has been in my pocket for a long time.
“Yeah,” I say. “The idea of it.”
He bumps my shoulder. I bump back.
We sit in the sun.
Archer finds me at the river path in the afternoon. He walks alongside me. We walk together. The river path is covered by shadows from the light through the trees. The sound of the water ripples fills the air, and the carnival has gone quiet. The Ferris wheel is standing silent, waiting to be packed away or stored or whatever happens to Ferris wheels between seasons.
“What happens to it?” I ask, nodding at the wheel. “In the off-season.”
“It stays,” Archer explains. “They fold the cars and lock the mechanism. It’s a landmark now. Has been for thirty years.”
A landmark. Something that stays and becomes part of the geography of a place, something people orient by.I found it by the Ferris wheel, people might say.I know where that is from the Ferris wheel.
I look at it and I think about the first night, driving in, seeing the skeletal arm of it against the indigo sky, and feeling… something. That first feeling I didn’t have a word for.
I have the word now.
Home.
“Archer,” I say.
“Yeah?”
“The ring toss counter.”
