My sister sits cross-legged on the bottom bunk and lays out a game of solitaire, batting my hand away when I reach out to straighten a card. We’re fresh from a turn at the showers, but our skin and hair still smell of caramel corn and roasted meat. We hear our mother outside, laughing with the other concessions ladies—she knows most of them from one job or another. Soon, she’ll rap her knuckles on the metal siding, and we’ll have to shut the lights and get in bed.
Lucia and I share a rickety bunk bed—the plywood inked with the doodles of people who’ve worked the fairgrounds before us. Lucia claimed the top bunk since she’s the older one by seven years, but most nights I crawl up to her bed, and so long as I don’t lay on her hair, she lets me stay. We’re lucky to be on the lot for the season, and also for the tear-down before the jump. I would’ve said we were happy here.
I fall back on my pillow and look up at the milky polaroids Lucia has tucked into the underside of the bunk.
“I miss Dad,” I say.
“I don’t see how, Rosa. Since you don’t even remember him,” she says.
“I do so remember. I remember how he died, even. The pig-rig on I 35.”
“Big-rig.”
“What?”
“The truck that hit his was called a big-rig,” Lucia says.
“That’s what I said.”
I’d always pictured the truck that killed him pulling a livestock trailer—with a stench following it and a row of pig snouts poking through the holes in the side.
Lucia rolls her eyes. “Besides, you were too little. You remember the story; you don’t remember him.”
“Do so,” I say, though I hardly think to distinguish between what I remember and the stories Lucia tells me about my own life. Our mother’s compass pulls us everywhere and nowhere. Still, Lucia can recount all the places we’ve moved from, ticking them off on her fingers. Each place, a vignette flashing by like the lighted windows of the houses that backed up to the tracks that time we rode the train to Saint Paul—every one complete yet insignificant.
“Don’t worry, Rosita.” She draws a card from the deck, taps it against her temple. “I’ve got it all up here.”
Before we crawl in bed, Lucia pulls out the black Sharpie she stole from the Corn Roast where she cashiers this season, and we add our initials to the plywood underside of the bunk. When she slips the pen and playing cards in her pack, I see a big stack of bills. I look away; I don’t want to know why she’d skim, what she might be saving for. From the top bunk, we watch the headlights of cars leaving the fairgrounds slide across the ceiling. Lucia makes up stories about the lives of the people in the cars. The one with the loud engine is a man rushing to surprise his girlfriend at the train station—he has a bouquet of red roses on the seat next to him and when he sees her on the platform with another man, he’ll toss them in the street. The car with the music blaring carries a famous traveling mariachi band, with each seatbelt stretched across two laps and the trunk packed with horns and guitarróns.
When our mother comes in, Lucia tells us once again she is leaving—going to live with our father’s family in Ohio or to Los Angeles where you can work a theme park year-round, stay in one place.
“When I go, I won’t say goodbye,” Lucia says. “I’ll just go.” She always says that, so our mother gets ready for bed without answering, brushing and braiding her long glossy hair. There’s a weight to the heat tonight, and she adjusts the fan to blow on us in the top bunk. As we lie waiting for sleep, we listen to the pulsing hum of the field crickets.
The next day feels longer than most. Our mother works the Pronto Pup stand and I pass out burlap sacks at the Giant Slide. After dinner at the commissary, I catch the breeze from the bunkhouse roof, but when the fireworks over the grandstand finish, Lucia still doesn’t come. I don’t want to go check that her stuff is gone—her clothes and the polaroids and the cash—so I sit out on the roof a while longer. With the fireworks finished, the field crickets continue their song where they left off.
I consider what we’ll remember about this place, which bits will stick. It could be the knotty faces grimacing in the pine planks of the bunkhouse or the tented concession stands plunked down along The Midway like little Monopoly pieces—green, blue, yellow. Finally, I decide it’ll be the long line of cars inching to the exit as the fairground parking lots empty out—all those taillights like a red ruby snake slithering up the road to the highway. I turn to tell Lucia; then remember she is gone.
