The Bear He Won Twice

“Now everybody has one,” he said, and took it, and that was all the arithmetic that boy needed.

The ride man waved them forward. Kinsey climbed into the swinging bench seat first, and Mack climbed in after her, and they sat there side by side with a big white bear on each lap.

The bar came down. The wheel lifted them up and back, and they rose up over the midway, up over the lights and the tents and the cattle barns, into the dark.

Viv stood next to me at the rail and watched them go up. Neither of us said anything for a whole turn of the wheel. Adele stood on her other side, holding her hand.

“I’ve been so mad at you all summer,” I said finally. “I said things about you, Viv. I said them out loud.”

“I gave you reason,” she said. “I’d have said worse.”

“You should have let us carry some of it.”

“I know.” She wiped her nose on her sleeve like a little girl. “I know that now.”

Malcolm came walking up the midway a few minutes later. He had grease on his arms and the man with the mustache’s cowbell in his hand, because the man had insisted Mack keep it.

He stopped when he saw his sister’s face. He looked at me. I nodded.

He did not say anything. He just walked up and put his arms around her, and Viv folded into her little brother’s chest the way she must have when they were kids, and he held her there while the wheel went around.

“Why didn’t you call me?” he asked, into her hair.

“Because you’d have come,” she said. “And then it would have been real.”

Up at the top of the wheel, the bench stopped and rocked while they loaded the bottom.

We could see the two of them up there against the sky, two small shapes and two big white bears.

Kinsey was pointing at something out past the fairgrounds, the lights of town maybe, or the water tower.

Mack was leaning over to look, holding his bear with one arm and the safety bar with the other.

Then Kinsey laughed. We all heard it, clear as anything, all the way down on the ground.

It was a little girl’s laugh, the real kind, the kind that just comes out of you before you can stop it.

Viv grabbed my arm so hard it left a mark. “That’s the first time,” she said. “That’s the first time all summer.”

They rode it three times. The ride man let them stay on. Nobody in line complained.

When they finally climbed off, Kinsey was holding Mack’s hand, and she did not let go of it the whole walk back up the midway.