Chapter 6

Dell's words hung in the hall, and then the hands started to rise.

Merritt didn't count them. Rosetta did, under her breath, the way she must have counted things her whole life.

More than half were up before Twyla finished turning around. Then more. Then nearly the whole room, some hands held high like schoolkids who finally knew an answer.

"Carried," Dell said, and set the gavel down gentle, like it was hot.

Merritt sat very still. She had braced so long for the no that the yes went through her like cold water.

The fair was still asleep the next morning when they gathered in the office, the midway rides tarped and dripping dew, the gates not open yet.

Harlan Pruett brought a typed page and read the part that counted.

The board's vote was recorded and valid. Twyla Weyburn and Orville Weyburn were removed as officers of the association, effective at once.

"The concealment question goes to the county attorney," Pruett said. "That's a separate road, and it runs on its own clock. Weeks, likely months. But it runs."

Orville looked at his boots. He had run out of the room he usually filled.

Twyla stood by the window with her arms crossed, and when it went quiet she said the thing she had spent a week not saying.

"I knew Ansel had a girl." Her voice had gone flat. "A letter came years back, in a child's hand, asking after him. I burned it. Told Orville it was nothing."

She looked at Merritt for the first time like a person and not a problem.

"You were nine dollars an hour and a dirty bandana. How was I supposed to know you were anybody."

"You weren't," Merritt said. "That's the part I keep landing on. You shouldn't have had to know who I was to keep your hands off me."

She let that be the whole of it. She didn't want the rest, the arguing, the sting traded back.

Then Merritt said the thing she had decided on in her truck at four that morning.

"I don't want to own it."

Pruett looked up from his page.

"If the deed comes to me alone, the bank calls Orville's note and the whole place gets sold for lumber and parking," Merritt said. "I can't sign for a note on nine dollars an hour. A trust can. It takes the mortgage over, refinances it against the grounds, and holds the deed clear of it. I didn't come here for ground. I came for her."

She nodded at Rosetta.

"Put it in a community trust. Rosetta chairs it as long as she's living. The fair stays open."

Pruett took his glasses off and polished them on his sleeve. "A trust can carry the note," he said. "It takes a board vote and a bank willing to rewrite the terms. It isn't simple. It's possible."

Rosetta's eyes went wet and she didn't bother to hide it.

"You'd give it away," she said.

"I'd keep it," Merritt said. "Just not in my name."

They signed what they could that morning and left the rest for Pruett to draw up proper.

Before they broke up, Dell slid a form across the desk to Hazel, who had come with her mother to see it through.

"Fair board scholarship," he said. "First one in ten years. The girl who kept her phone steady earned it."

Hazel read it twice and couldn't find a thing to say, which Merritt figured was a first for her.

The gates opened at ten.

Merritt took a steward's badge and a spot by the main gate, because somebody had to, and because she liked the smell of the place first thing.

A little boy came up crying before noon, maybe six, holding the torn stub where his exhibitor tag used to be.

"I lost my number," he said. "They won't let me show my rabbit."

Merritt knelt and found the tag snagged in the hem of his jacket, half ripped loose.

She pressed it flat and folded his small hand around it, the way her mother used to fold hers around the pass.

"Keep it close," she told him. "Some things are only lost once."

He ran for the rabbit barn without a thank-you, which was exactly right.

Merritt stood up.

The wooden pass rode in her left pocket, where it had ridden every day since her mother died, and past the gate the old grounds filled up with people who had no idea what the week had cost.

She touched the oak square once through the denim and went back to work.