Chapter 7

Mere nanoseconds before Lucy met her wooden match, a head poked out of a window.

"Yoohoo, you," it said.

His nearly bald head, with an ear level crown of dark black hairy effort, leaned from an RV window. Dressed in a slick, slick, city slicker suit, he spoke to the boy with the guitar with a slick tone, sliding effortlessly sideways towards the stairs.

Guitar boy glanced up at slicker suit just when Lucy blacked out: both surprised, both faced with blackness.

He never saw her hit.

His manager hit him hard with another truth, this one in monotone.

"He's not coming, you know," the head said.

Guitar boy got up, slow, as if unfolding years of stiffness from his joints, and then lithely lifted the guitar into a nondescript black case, closing the lid on years of dreams.

One had come true, at least, but was it even his? Or was it an anemone? A windflower? Something that danced in the wind on top of a slender hope, a monotonous dream, an always wish?

He kept dancing. The wind kept blowing. Maybe it was time to stop.

"You have another interview in five minutes," slicker said.

Guitar boy nodded, taking the stairs into the camper with quiet fortitude, long limbs pushing him forcefully into the cabin. In his pockets, his fingers clenched, hard and strong, soft and taut. His heart trembled, his fingers flexed.

Before going in, he took one last look for that girl, that girl he'd seen somewhere before, but she was nowhere to be seen. A dang crowd had gathered, obstructing his view. He hated crowds.

He slammed the door in submission.

Meanwhile, across the parking lot, a wiry Hispanic drove his yellow Mustang into a parking space near Gate 10, preparing to follow Lucy's exact footsteps. He could still smell her perfume.

She was here. He could feel it. And besides, he had watched her enter this exact gate mere moments before, with his binoculars.

But in his head it was his heart that knew exactly where she was and what she was thinking. He just used his eyes to prove himself right. Every time. Whenever he watched her. Which was most of the time. He even saw her in his sleep. Maybe someday she would see him, too.

He walked her way, spotting her easily.

Lucy and her family lingered in front of the bathrooms, waiting for their menfolk to arrive.

An inevitable discussion would follow.

Every year they gathered at this pitstop, in a halfhearted little family circle, all excited about fair food, fair exhibits, fair shows, fair shopping, fair fun. And every year they stood in this spot for seventeen minutes asking each other what they wanted to do, and each year for seventeen minutes they each replied with a misnomer, a red herring, a nonchalant and unobtrusive non-choice. They politely and frustratingly hemmed and hawed about which way to embark, what to do.

Lucy knew this well.

During minute eighteen she would suggest they meander over to the car show while waiting for the dog show to start.

And they did.