of those, beginning with the one I ran off with when I was eighteen. After two back-to-back fiascoes in the spring, I had taken a vow of chastity which I had kept all summer, but dammit all, I
I’ve made so many bad choices in the last few years that I’ve started doubting my own judgment everywhere except in the courtroom. What if I’d already met the man who could have been perfect for me and bobbled my big chance? Gone chasing after the sexy one and missed out on the steady one?
Like Bradley Needham, for instance. Brad and his wife had stopped to speak to Portland and Avery, with nods for the rest of us. Janice is one of our better courtroom clerks and Brad’s director of marketing for Longleaf, a sausage and meat-packing company headquartered here in the county. I realized I hadn’t seen Janice in the courtroom since early summer.
“You haven’t been sick, have you?” I asked.
“Oh, no,” she said, plucking a stray hair from the collar of my shirt.
Janice is a picker—hair, threads, bits of lint. She can’t seem to help herself, and we either pretend not to notice or stay out of arm’s reach.
“Bradley had a temporary assignment with Longleaf’s West Coast distributor and we’ve been in California since the end of June. It was only supposed to be for a month, but everything was such a mess, it took twice as long as they thought for him to straighten everything out.” She picked a gnat off my bare arm. “We didn’t mind, though. Longleaf put us up in a residential hotel with a swimming pool, maid service, everything. Didn’t cost us a cent. It was like a second honeymoon.”
“Y’all been back long?” Portland asked politely.
“Tuesday.” Portland’s nubbly blue shirt had picked up so much fluff from Dwight and Sylvia’s plush dog that Janice didn’t seem to know where to start. Her thin fingers darted in and out. “We decided to take the rest of the week off, give us time to unpack and get the house in order. I really ought to be there right now—you wouldn’t believe the dust!—but Bradley just had to come see the carnival. Like we hadn’t been to Disneyland twice while we were out there in California. He doesn’t even enjoy it all that much. But he thought he ought to come out tonight to support the harvest festival, and as much as he has to travel, I don’t like him to have to go places here by himself. You know how husbands are.”
Her fingers moved compulsively toward Portland’s shirt.
“Yes, I know,” said Portland, and move out of reach.
If I’d been less choosy, I probably could have had Brad Needham for a husband. He called me at least a half- dozen times when I first came home to Colleton County several years ago, but I didn’t have much enthusiasm for sausage back then or for Brad, either, though he’d been considered a good catch. A little dull maybe, but cute, decent, hardworking, no bad habits. His best features were his dark brown hair and eyes. He had thick eyelashes and even thicker curly hair that still fell boyishly over his forehead and almost touched his collar in back. Probably made a comfortable living back then, too. But I was still getting over someone in New York in those days and I never even let Brad buy me a cup of coffee.
Of course, there was also that matter of height. Every man in my family’s at least five-ten and most are over six feet. It would have been cruel to bring in someone a good six or eight inches shorter, no matter how sexy his eyes.
Hadn’t bothered Janice. She’s three inches taller than Brad and four or five years older, a house-proud woman who wears silky pastel dresses and holds her long hair back with headbands that match. Tonight she wore pale coral and the color looked good against her dark hair and the tan she’d picked up in California. No children, but they seem happy together and there’s been no courthouse gossip about their marriage, even though Brad’s on the road a lot, from what I hear.
By ten-thirty, parents with small children had drifted toward the gates, noticeably thinning the crowd so that walking the midway was a little easier. We’d tried almost every game and had acquired more prizes—a purple-and-green plush snake (Reid), an eight-inch pink teddy bear (Portland), and a poster of Richard Petty, which I’d probably wind up giving to Reese to liven up the bare walls of his trailer. (I’d actually been aiming for Willie Nelson, but someone jiggled my arm just as the dart left my hand.) We were at that point of debating whether to call it a night and go find a quiet watering hole, or just call it a night, period.
Even though she can’t drink now and was already yawning, Portland insisted that it didn’t matter to her. “Whatever y’all want to do.”
Sylvia, who hadn’t yet won a thing on her own, was still anxious to try something called the Dozer, which sat slightly apart from the other stands beneath its own red-and-white-striped tent. The tent’s two end walls acted as a divider from the kiddie duck pond next to it on one side and a cotton candy wagon on the other side. The other two flaps were tied open so that players could enter from either side of the midway.
As for the Dozer itself, picture a rectangular box on wheels with its four sides hinged at the top so they could be folded up out of the way. Interlocking red A’s were stenciled around the bottom. It had been too crowded the first time we passed it. Now there were more than enough places to accommodate all six of us and we reached in our pockets for quarters.
“I used to be pretty good at this,” Sylvia said. “Wait till the pusher goes back before you put your quarters in so they’ll land behind the pile.”
The setup reminded me of an old-fashioned candy counter. Each station was a separate glass box. Just at eye level was a shelf heaped with quarters and poker chips that could be redeemed for prizes or cash. A pusher blade like the blade on a bulldozer came forward and the pile of quarters seemed to teeter on the edge. Then the blade went back and I quickly reached up and pushed two quarters through the slot while the blade was still retreating. The two coins rolled down to the empty part of the shelf and lay flat. As the blade came forward, it pushed my quarters toward the pile accumulated at the front edge. The pile quivered and a single quarter tumbled over and down into a cup at waist level. I immediately retrieved it and fed it back into the slot. When the blade came forward, though, that coin slid harmlessly to the side. I fed in two more quarters with no better luck than before. One landed on the pile, the other rolled off to the side and disappeared.
A tiny hand-lettered sign there read COINS THAT FALL INTO THE SIDE SPILLS ARE RETAINED BY OPERATOR. (Like anyone really thinks the operator would give them back?)
I could see the logic of Sylvia’s instructions, though. I needed to lay down a carpet of quarters at the back
