Before we left that night, Viv did one more thing, and I want to tell it right, because it mattered to me.
She walked back to the ring toss. All of us went with her. The line was still there, smaller now, and the man with the mustache was counting his rings for the night.
She stood in front of that booth, in front of whoever was still standing there, and said it plain.
“I took a prize out of this boy’s arms tonight, in front of all of you,” she said.
“I was wrong to do it. I want you to know I’m sorry, and I told him so.”
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Nobody clapped. It was not that kind of moment. The man with the mustache just nodded slowly, and the older farmer, who was still hanging around by the lemonade stand, tipped his cap to her.
She tried to pay him back the five dollars. He would not take it.
“Put it toward the girl,” he said, and nodded at Kinsey, and Viv had to turn around and look at the funnel cake trailer for a minute.
On the drive home, Mack fell asleep in the back seat with his bear and the cowbell in his lap.
Malcolm drove with one hand and held mine with the other, and neither of us talked until we turned off the blacktop onto our gravel road.
“I said some things about her this summer too,” Malcolm said, finally, when we pulled into the yard. “Out in the shop. To Rich, even.”
“We didn’t know,” I said.
“We could have asked,” he said, and he was right, and we sat there in the truck with the engine ticking for a long time before we woke up our son and carried him in.
I wish I could tell you Kinsey got better the next week. She didn’t. Chemo does not care how good a night you had at the fair.
But things changed after that night. Viv started answering the group text again. She let Adele and me take turns driving Kinsey to Children’s Mercy, eighty miles up Highway 7 and I-49 into Kansas City, so she could sleep one Thursday out of three.
Malcolm and two other fellows from the fire department went out and helped Rich finish the beans the second week of October, so he could be home for one of the treatments.
A man from the co-op, who would hate to be named, lent them a second truck.
Our church started a casserole list. Kinsey asked for it to be quiet, and it was. People just left things on the porch.
And Mack went over to Viv’s every Sunday afternoon that fall. He carried his green pop bottle in a plastic grocery sack, and he set it up on the rail of Viv’s front porch, and he taught Kinsey to throw rings.