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the wheel with something very much like a full-grown woman.
    And then the old problem came up of what to say, while they loaded the rest of the cars and we rose to the top. I solved it by saying nothing. That seemed fine with her. She didn’t seem uncomfortable at all. Just relaxed and content to be up here looking down at the people and the whole Karnival spread around her strung with lights and up over the trees to our houses, rocking the car gently back and forth, smiling, humming a tune I didn’t know.
    Then the wheel began turning and she laughed and I thought it was the happiest, nicest sound I’d ever heard and felt proud of myself for asking her, for making her happy and making her laugh the way she did.
    As I say, the wheel was fast and up at the top almost completely silent, all the noise of the Karnival held down below as though enveloped there, and you plunged down into it and then back out of it again, the noise receding quickly, and at the top you were almost weightless in the cool breeze so that you wanted to hold on to the crossbar for a moment for fear of flying away entirely.
    I looked down to her hands on the bar and that was when I saw the ring. In the moonlight it looked thin and pale. It sparkled.
    I made a show of enjoying the view but mostly it was her smile and the excitement in her eyes I was enjoying, the way the wind pressed and fluttered the blouse across her breasts.
    Then our ride was at its peak and the wheel turned faster, the airy sweeping glide at its most graceful and elegant and thrilling as I looked at her, her lovely open face rushing first through a frame of stars and then past the dark schoolhouse and then the pale brown tents of the Kiwanis, her hair blowing back and then forward over her brushed cheeks as we rose again, and I suddenly felt those first two or three years that she had lived and I hadn’t like a terrible weighted irony, like a curse, and thought for a moment, it isn’t fair. I can give her this but that’s all and it’s just not fair.
    The feeling passed. By the time the ride was over and we waited near the top all that was left was the pleasure at how happy she looked. And how alive.
    I could talk now.
    “How’d you like it?”
    “God, I loved it! You keep treating me to things, David.”
    “I can’t believe you never rode before.”
    “My parents . . . I know they always meant to take us someplace. Palisades Park or somewhere. We just never got around to it, I guess.”
    “I heard about . . . everything. I’m sorry.”
    There. It was out.
    She nodded. “The worst is missing them, you know? And knowing they won’t be back again. Just knowing that. Sometimes you forget and it’s as though they’re on vacation or something and you think, gee, I wish they’d call. You miss them. You forget they’re really gone. You forget the past six months even happened. Isn’t that weird? Isn’t that crazy? Then you catch yourself . . . and it’s real again.
    “I dream about them a lot. And they’re always still alive in my dreams. We’re happy.”
    I could see the tears well up. She smiled and shook her head.
    “Don’t get me started,” she said.
    We were on the downside now, moving, only five or six cars ahead of us. I saw the next group waiting to get on. I looked down over the bar and noticed Meg’s ring again. She saw me looking.
    “My mother’s wedding band,” she said. “Ruth doesn’t like me to wear it much but my mother would have. I’m not going to lose it. I’d never lose it.”
    “It’s pretty. It’s beautiful.”
    She smiled. “Better than my scars?”
    I flushed but that was okay, she was only kidding me. “A lot better.”
    The wheel moved down again. Only two more cars to go. Time moved dreamlike for me, but even at that it moved too quickly. I hated to see it end.
    “How do you like it?” I asked. “Over at the Chandler’s?”
    She shrugged. “Okay I guess. Not like home. Not the way it was. Ruth’s kind of . . . funny