Chapter 16 Brick
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The midway smells like almost every bad decision I’ve ever enjoyed.
Onions softening on a flat top, sugar turning to smoke in a kettle, fryer oil that’s lived a whole season and still has stories left.
We claim a splintery picnic table under strings of lights shaped like little stars, the kind of place where the wood always leans a little and the ketchup bottles sweat.
Levi’s riding late, so this is dinner—concession food and noise you have to holler through.
“Okay,” Blaze says, dropping a paper boat of curly fries like she’s dealing cards. “New rule. Everyone has to eat a vegetable, or I will tell the internet your secrets.”
Cash snorts and chomps a stuffed jalapeno. “Spicy counts as a vegetable.”
“Spicy counts as a personality trait,” Blaze fires back. She tips her head toward Levi. “You got your nerves under control, or do I need to go bully your draw into compliance?”
Levi peels back the foil on a sausage and peppers and shrugs a shoulder that means he knows exactly what he is tonight, and he’s not rattled.
“I’m fine.” He glances at the grandstands, at the slice of sky that still has a little pink left.
“And the peppers and onions on my sandwich count as my vegetables.”
Reno shows up last, balancing two plates and a plastic cup with the kind of swagger that wants to pass for balance.
His hair is clean, his shirt is pressed, and his limp is worse than he admits.
He grins at the table the way a man grins at a panel of judges he intends to charm.
“Who ordered the zesty onion mountain?” He drops it in front of Blaze, then sets a corn dog in front of Cash like he’s five, and Cash is delighted to pretend he is.
“Host with the most,” Blaze says. “Who died and made you concierge?”
“I’m proving a point,” Reno says, raising his cup. “See? Family dinner. On me. On the midway. No bottle in sight.”
There’s soda in the cup. I don’t smell a whiff of liquor on it. But there’s also that sheen in his eye that means somewhere along the way, he took a detour. I don’t say it, though. No need to pick a fight.
The kids chatter, and Reno laughs too loud, too quick.
Then he leans back and tips his chin toward the lights like the applause is for him.
“You hear the announcer earlier? When he spotted me in the stands, he said I was the most promising talent never to fulfill his potential. Which is a compliment where I’m from. ”
Blaze freezes halfway through a fry. “That was not a compliment.”
“Sure it was.” He winks. “Means I was promising.”
“Means he’s a coward,” Cash says easily. “He should say you’re great or shut up.”
Levi nods in that small way that means he’s filing something away for later. “Okay. Plan. Kansas City next month. We’re there the second weekend. After that, it’s Amarillo if the purse hits the number Ford promised.”
“Ford always promises numbers,” Blaze says. “Ford is a walking calculator with hair gel.”
“Hey,” Cash says, “Ford’s hair gel got me a boot deal.”
Reno pokes at the onion mountain with a skewer. “I’ll be in Kansas City,” he says to the table in general, and then to the space over my shoulder where I know he wants a certain person to appear by force of will.
Annie. I can’t tell if he’s hung up on her, or if he’s just bored and wants someone to play with.
Blaze’s eyes flick to me and away, quick as a prayer you don’t want the priest to hear. Cash pretends not to notice anything that isn’t fried. Levi keeps the plan moving because that’s just him.
“Layover in Tulsa,” he continues, “so we can avoid the usual gridlock.” He points at the grandstands with the end of his sandwich. “Tonight’s pen looks good. I saw them move the third panel. It won’t pinch. Should be a good run.”
Reno mutters into his fried onion mass, “The Annie thing is stupid. She should have stuck it out with me.”
My gut sinks, and silence slides across the table like a long shadow.
The lights buzz. Somewhere to our left, a carnival game rings a bell, and a teenager yells like he invented throwing.
The words I could say peel back like old paint in my head and show the raw wood underneath. Some nights are like that.
“Sometimes,” I say as lightly as I can manage, “people change before we’re ready to see it.”
He laughs with his teeth. His voice is irritated grit. “Thanks for the wisdom, Dad. I’ll embroider it on a pillow.”
“All I mean is, sometimes people grow apart.”
Reno leans back with a sigh that’s memory and venom in equal parts.
“We were good, though. She liked my terrible jokes. She ate cereal out of a mixing bowl. She’d let me read to her when my leg hurt and I wanted to pretend it didn’t.
She loved—” He cuts off. He stares past us, past tonight. “She loved me.”
“You’ll find your way without her. It’s not easy, but with time, you figure out how to keep going.”
His scowl is powerful. “That mean I should go dance at a club to meet girls? Oh, wait. I can’t.” He gestures at his leg. “Maybe you should keep your advice to yourself.”
“It means,” Levi says, careful, “maybe you put the bottle down before you do anything else.”
The air goes still, and I’m not sure what’s coming next. A harsh word? A thrown fist?
Cash claps once, sharply, like he’s trying to train a dog. “Hey. Kansas City. Plans? Thoughts?”
The conversation clicks back into gear. We talk draw and gate and whether the DJ this week is going to go rogue and try to tug the crowd toward a line dance.
Blaze announces she’s threatening the announcer with an air horn if he calls her “darlin’” on a hot mic again.
Cash opines about run-out lanes, and Levi nods along, like his mind isn’t in the ring already.
But the noise sits over my shoulders like a coat I used to love and now only wear because I haven’t learned what else to do with my arms. I eat and I talk and I play my part, and under that something dull and honest gnaws.
The feeling that this is all endless.
I’ve been doing this for longer than some of the boys coming up have been alive. I’ve stood under strings of lights and learned to lose and win with a nod. Ever since Vicki, the victories have landed nothing at all but a way to pay the bills.
They keep the lights on. They bought schoolbooks and boots and properties. They gave my children ladders. If I chose not to, I’d never have to work another day in my life. But the wins are hollow victories without someone to share them with.
All my kids have found their way into the grind in one form or another—Blaze with her chaos, Cash with his glue, Levi with his metronome. Reno…hasn’t.
He’s always been the smartest of us. I think that’s why he’s so miserable.
He knows too much about the angles. When they were young, Vicki homeschooled them between events with a patience that should have earned her a crown, and Reno lived for the afternoons when I’d find him under the awning with a library book and a look on his face like a boy who just discovered a better map.
I nudged him into the ring anyway. You can love words and still need to learn what your legs are for, I told him. Told myself.
I wonder now if I was wrong. Maybe he’d be happier with an overdue book fee and a quiet desk.
Maybe he’d have two good knees and bad posture and a decent retirement account by now.
The night he got body-slammed into the wall, the sound went dull and wrong in a way I still hear when refrigerators kick on at midnight.
For a long wicked second, I thought we lost him. The guilt sits in me like a sinker, small and heavy. No amount of guilt will put feeling back in his leg, though.
And now, there’s Annie for me to feel guilty about. Except, I can’t bring myself to feel guilty about her. Not in any real way. I’m falling for a woman who woke the part of me I buried next to his mother. That deserves a better word than guilt.
“Dad?” Levi says, waving a hand in front of my face like he’s checking pupils. “You here? Did you take a hit and not tell us?”
I almost laugh. The image that arrives on cue makes my ears heat. I keep it to myself, because a man doesn’t survive this long by advertising bad sense in a family that mocks it for sport.
“I’m fine,” I say. “Just tired. What’d I miss?”
“Only my claim to fame,” Blaze says. “I’m going to bully the grand marshal into letting me shoot T-shirts out of the air cannon next year.”
“She’s already planning the Kansas City after-party,” Cash says. “Theme—My sister has questionable taste but great playlists.”
“Second theme,” Blaze says, pointing a fry at him. “Cash thinks he invented the two-step and will provide tutorials for a fee.”
“Not a fee,” he says. “A suggested donation.”
Levi leans in, the picture of patience. “We were saying the travel is going to be ugly. Heat’s gonna punch. Dad, you’ll hate it.”
“Heat and I got divorced in ninety-nine,” I say. “We don’t speak.”
“Announcer in Kansas City is that guy you like,” Blaze says, and her voice goes wicked. “Stu Benson. I will personally hog-tie and castrate him in the middle of the ring if he calls me ‘little lady’ again.”
The announcer booms a name I don’t catch. A kid somewhere wins a stuffed tiger and holds it up like a bloodied flag. Wind pushes dust across the midway like a phantom of better times.
Levi drains his water and stands, stretching his back the way his mother taught him to. “I need to go tape.”
“Let me,” I say, automatic.
He smiles in that way that makes me feel useless and proud in the same beat. “I’ll come find you if I forget how.”
Blaze jumps up and kisses both his cheeks in quick succession. “Do not die,” she says. “It would mess up our vibe.”
“Nothing about our vibe is mess-free,” Cash says, tossing his trash and catching the bag on the rim like a show-off. “Dad, you doing your pacing thing, or do you want me to do it for you?”
“I’ll pace—”
“Tradition,” Levi echoes, and claps Reno’s shoulder as he passes like he’s giving him an out if he wants it. “You coming?”
Reno hesitates one half beat and then shakes his head. “I’m gonna sit for a minute.”
“Suit yourself,” Levi says, then nods at me. “Don’t get lost.”
“I know the route,” I say.
The rest of us clean up our mess, and on the way to the chutes, Blaze hooks her arm through mine. “You okay?”
“Yep.”
“Liar.”
“Maybe not okay. Functional,” I correct.
She snorts. “Better. I like functional.”
We walk through the lights and the noise and the old song of this life that I love and resent in equal measure.
I could list one hundred ways I don’t deserve a second sunrise and one hundred ways I have earned one anyway.
I think about Annie in a ridiculous costume I would never ask her to wear, and then I think about her in her scrubs and her ponytail and the way she sets a suture.
I wonder how a man asks for what he wants without turning it into a joke or a weapon against his own son. I wonder if I’ll learn in time.
Behind me, somewhere, my oldest son decides whether tonight is a night where he thinks or drinks. I’m falling for Annie—ain’t no choice in that. But I have a choice in how I handle it with Reno. Don’t know if I’ll get it right.
All I can do is try.