A sample from
Asked to Stay
I was not supposed to be at the fair alone. I want that on the record.
My last twelve-hour shift ended at seven on Sunday morning like they all do, with a hand-off report, a vending-machine granola bar and forty minutes of county road with the radio up so I wouldn't fall asleep at the stop sign by the Kroger. I slept until four in the afternoon like something hit by a truck. I woke up rested, which on nights is rarer than a parking space at the Dairy Queen in July, and I had a whole Sunday evening with nobody's ventilator in it.
Then Renee texted.
"Kids have the stomach thing. Both of them. USE MY TICKET. Wear the red top."
Renee is my older sister. She is forty-two and she runs my social life the way air traffic control runs O'Hare, and she had bought two tickets to the last night of the Gloaming Fair for what she called girls' night and what I called her getting me out of the house before I turned into a recliner.
I looked at the laundry. I looked at Pickles, who was asleep on the laundry. I am thirty-eight years old, I have been an ICU nurse for eleven years, all of them on nights, and I know exactly how to be useful at eleven o'clock on a Sunday. I had no idea at all how to want something.
So I wore the red top.
It's a wine-red wrap top that crosses over and ties at the side, and on me (five-foot-one, a lot of chest, a waist that goes in like somebody pinched it, and hips and a butt that go right back out again) it does exactly what Renee says it does. Black skinny jeans that fit like I meant it. Black ankle boots with a heel that bought me an inch and a half I badly needed. My leather moto jacket zipped halfway against the cold. And my hair down. Dark honey-blonde, thick, past my shoulders, out of the claw clip and the scrub cap for the first time in a month. It felt like taking off a bra at the end of a double.
Front Street to the fairground is a ten-minute walk. It was in the low forties and my breath came out in front of me like I was a teakettle with somewhere to be. You could see the Ferris wheel from my porch, lit up neon pink and tangerine over the roof of the Methodist church, turning slow as a ceiling fan on its lowest setting.
At the gate there was a man in a striped waistcoat, red and cream, with sleeve garters and a straw boater tipped back on his head, and a voice that could have called the cows home from two counties over.
"Last night, last chance, last call for wonders!" He took Renee's ticket out of my hand, held it up to the string bulbs like a jeweler with a diamond, and bowed. "One admission, madam, and may I say the red is a decision. Ludo Pickett. I talk. Everybody else here does the work."
"My sister picked it," I said.
End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.