State Fair (2 page)

Elvia leaned down and checked on her seven-week-old daughter, Sophia Louisa Aragon Littleton. My goddaughter was carefully swaddled and tucked away in her fancy silver and blue top-of-the-line Graco stroller. “All I know is I cannot even peek at anything fried for the next six months. I’m still fat as one of your 4-H hogs.”

I laughed right in her face. “What are you a size six now?” I mimed holding a phone to my ear. “Calling Richard Simmons for an emergency intervention.”

Elvia laid her freshly manicured hand across her stomach. It
was
still a little pudgy from childbirth, but she was by no stretch of anyone’s imagination
fat.

“I’m still a size eight!” she cried. “Honestly, what do movie stars do to get their figures back so quickly?”

I’d already turned my attention back to the painted menu. “Hey, look, fried pickles! That’s new.” I turned to gauge her reaction. Her lips, painted a shiny pomegranate red to match her nails, were scrunched up; her black lashes glistened with tears.

“Movie stars?” I said, swatting a fly that hovered over Sophie Lou’s stroller. “Oh, they live on lettuce and laxatives. The photos you see of them? Totally fake and touched up by experts trained by the FBI. I read that in the
National Enquirer
so it must be true.”

“Emory practically force-feeds me! Says his daughter needs hearty milk to drink. I informed him that he gets to breast feed the next one.”

“Good luck with that,
mamacita
.”

THE TRUTH WAS MY COUSIN EMORY, WHO ALSO HAPPENED TO BE her husband, wouldn’t or couldn’t ever force Elvia to do anything. He was, however, not above tempting her by having all her favorite foods readily available. Foods cooked by her own mother who made the best green chile enchiladas, sweet corn tamales and killer flan on the Central Coast.

“You’ve read every prepregnancy, midpregnancy and postpregnancy book written in the last twenty years,” I said. “Don’t they all agree that it takes a little time to lose your baby weight?” I stooped down and ran my finger across my goddaughter’s creamy golden cheek. She didn’t even stir. “Ah, sweet Sophie Lou, what’re we going to do with your
mami grande
?”

Elvia shot me an irritated look. “Sophia! I told you to call her Sophia. You and Emory are going to drive me loco.”

After much back and forth about their daughter’s name, Elvia and Emory had finally agreed on Sophia Louisa, which seemed to fulfill both her Mexican and his Southern requirements . . . and let Sophia share a middle name with her adoring godmother—me. Elvia even reluctantly agreed that to honor our Arkansas roots, Emory and I could call her Sophie. That was until we actually started doing so.

“You promised Emory.” I stood up, shifting my leather backpack from one side to the other, my shoulders already aching. It felt like I was carrying ten bricks.

“Don’t you have to judge something?” Avoidance was always Elvia’s method of dealing with something she didn’t like.

“Not judge, help control. I’m going to be a pig wrangler for Novice and Intermediate 4-H Hog Showmanship. I don’t have to be there until nine a.m. Plenty of time.” I stretched out my arms and yawned. “I’m starving. I rushed out of the house with only one cup of coffee in my system. I cannot spend the next three hours chasing gilts and barrows . . . not to mention tiny humans, without sustenance.”

“Gilts and what?” She tilted her head, confused.

I smiled, having forgotten for a moment that my best friend since second grade and I had always had huge parts of our lives that were totally foreign to each other. She spoke Spanish. I spoke Ag. “Gilts are female pigs and barrows are castrated male pigs.”

“So what are uncastrated male pigs then?”

I grinned at her. “Boars.”

She returned my smile. “I dated a few bores in my time.”

I nodded, making one last note of Mustang Sallie’s menu. Deep-fried tomatoes. Wasn’t that actually kind of healthy? “I remember every one of them. Aren’t you glad you took my wise advice and married my adorable cousin?”

“Humph,” she said, still refusing to admit I’d picked the best man in the world for her and nagged her until she finally married him.

“Without him, there’d be no Sophie Lou,” I reminded her.

She gazed down at her sleeping daughter. “Sophia, Sophia.” Her voice was more gentle and tender than I’d ever heard it. “I’ll owe you forever,
mi amiga buena
.”

“Care to put that in writing?”

She rolled her black eyes. “Don’t you have some gilteds to push around?”

“Gilts,” I corrected. “Yes, but I have just enough time to sneak over to the Kiwanis booth and buy myself an eggs Kiwanis.” My stomach growled in anticipation of the traditional fair breakfast favored by the locals—crisp bacon, a fried egg, cheddar cheese and mayonnaise between two squished hamburger buns. I added Tabasco sauce for extra kick. Eggs Kiwanis had been my preferred fair breakfast since I sprouted teeth.

“A bowl of oatmeal would be much better for you,” she said, pushing the dark blue stroller down the carnival midway. All the colorful game stands and rides were closed, but a few carnies were starting to wander in, looking bleary-eyed, wild-haired and like they’d just gotten out of prison two minutes ago.

“You sound like Gabe,” I said, falling in beside her. My health-conscious-when-it-suited-him second husband was always nagging me about my vegetable-starved diet. “I will eat oatmeal at the fair the very minute someone deep-fries it and puts it on a stick.”

“Hey, Robbie!” I waved at one of the fair security people, dressed in a bright red polo shirt with Security in white letters across his chest. He drove by in one of the fair’s official yellow and red golf carts hauling a utility trailer filled with empty trash cans.

“Hey, girl!” Robbie called. “You stay outta trouble!” He was one of the woodworkers from the Artists’ Co-op affiliated with the Josiah Sinclair Folk Art Museum where I was curator and manager of the co-op. Many of our artists worked the fair either selling their products in a booth or taking one of the numerous temporary jobs like security detail or ground maintenance.

“So, what’s on your agenda today?” I asked Elvia.

“I promised Emory I’d check on the new hospitality suite. He wants to make sure that everything’s perfect, but between opening the new chicken restaurant in Santa Maria, all his civic volunteering and being president of the fair’s Booster Buddies, he’s scheduled to be in five places at one time.”

Emory and his father, my uncle Boone, owned Boone’s Good Eatin’ Chicken, a smoked chicken company based in Sugartree, Arkansas, Emory’s hometown and where Uncle Boone still lived. When Emory came west to pursue Elvia, he talked his father into opening up a restaurant selling their chicken in San Celina, gambling that Californians might enjoy the taste of real Southern-style smoked chicken. To support his adopted state, Emory bought chickens grown in California but used the smoking method perfected in Arkansas. The business became more successful than he’d anticipated, which was great in terms of money, but bad in terms of time, especially now that he was a husband and a new father.

Elvia reached over and tucked Sophie’s green and yellow Birds-inFlight quilt a little closer around her. My gramma Dove and I pieced the quilt the minute we found out Elvia was pregnant. “I just need to show up, make sure the smoked chicken sandwich platters are there and that there is plenty to go around. Then it’s back to the bookstore.” Elvia owned Blind Harry’s, San Celina’s only independent bookstore.

“Did the decorators finish in time?” I asked, walking past the giant Ferris wheel. Before the fair ended, in memory of Jack, I’d have to ride it. “Did they take your suggestions? I’ve been so busy getting the folk art museum’s fair booth set up and helping with 4-H, I haven’t even been up to see it.”

In appreciation for how well his business was going, Emory had donated half the money needed for the Booster Buddies’ new Western-themed hospitality lounge. The nondescript green building was located in front of the Sierra Vista Grandstand Stage and Arena where the most popular musical stars performed and where the country rodeo took place. The spacious and even more important during the fair, air-conditioned, hospitality suite was located on the second floor of the building. Not only was it a comfortable place for the Booster Buddies and their guests to relax, it also had some had some of the best concert seats. Located off the hospitality lounge’s balcony, the padded seats reserved for the Booster Buddies and guests had a dynamite view of the stage and arena. It was a small compensation for the thousands of volunteer hours members put in every year, not to mention the five-hundred-dollar per person annual dues.

“Yes, they finished last week. It looks wonderful. I’m glad Emory reconsidered the Pendleton furniture and went with my suggestion to hang Pendleton blankets on the walls instead. Can you picture beer and wine stains on ten-thousand-dollar sofas?” She gave a horrified shudder. “We went with navy corduroy sofas from JCPenney.”

I nodded in agreement. I’d enjoyed access to the Booster Buddies’ old hospitality suite for many years because my dad Ben and my gramma Dove were charter committee members. Twenty-seven years ago forty-two people formed a group whose primary reason for existing was to promote what was then called the San Celina County Fair. (A few years back the “powers that be” decided to fancy it up and rename it the Mid-State Fair, thus confusing folks ever after).

The Booster Buddies now had 150 members. Membership was supposed to be purely altruistic, but like most groups it had its political side. A lot of deals, both pertaining to the fair and other economic concerns in the county, took place in that spacious room nicknamed appropriately “the Bull Pen.” Still, even with the wheeling and dealing, the primary activity in the hospitality suite seemed to be drinking too much, eating too many sweet and salty snacks and more than occasionally, exaggerating everything from the size of your cattle herd to the return on your favorite mutual fund.

“Will I see you at the Bull Pen and concert tonight?” I asked. We’d turned around and were walking back toward the center of the fairgrounds. “Kathy Mattea is performing.”

Elvia narrowed one dark-lashed eye at me. “Can’t we rename the hospitality suite something a little classier?”

“Traditions are mighty hard to break round these parts.”

She gave an exaggerated sigh, conceding the truth of my statement. “I’ll probably drop by tonight since it’s the only way I’ll get to see my husband before one a.m. Luckily, Sophia’s taken to the bottle almost as well as to me, so I can express some breast milk and leave her with Mama.”

We parted ways at the hospitality suite. Amazed, I watched Elvia flip a few switches and turn part of Sophie’s stroller into a carrier. Holding the carrier on the crook of her arm like a purse, she punched the code on the locked door and headed up the stairs to the suite.

My thoughts were on my upcoming breakfast when my cell phone rang—“Happy Trails to You.”

“Ah, get lost, Dale,” I said out loud, fumbling through my leather backpack. I’d already started regretting the ease with which people could reach me on my cell phone. In the good old days, I could use being someplace like the fair as an excuse to be out of contact with people and their problems. But, since I was curator of the folk art museum, wife to San Celina’s often controversial police chief, with all its myriad and pain-in-the-butt social obligations, and granddaughter to Dove Ramsey Lyons, one of the busiest women in the county with her agriculture committees, homeless shelter and historical society meetings and way too many church activities, I felt obligated to be available.

“She’s back,” the gravelly, old voice whispered. It sounded like a tin cup of rattling quarters.

“Who is this?” I demanded. “Is this a prank call? How did you get this number?”

The voice took on its normal, scolding tone. “I’m the woman who paid for all your fancy prom dresses with her chicken money, that’s who.”

“Hey, Dove.” I smiled, knowing all along it was my gramma. “What’s cookin’, good lookin’?”

“No time for jokes. She arrives this evening on the Amtrak and I’m thinkin’ about just leaving her at the train station.”

I didn’t have to ask who “she” was because we’d been through this scenario countless times in the last thirty-something years since Dove moved in with Daddy and me right before Mama died of breast cancer.
She
was Garnet Louise Wilcox, Dove’s only sibling, with whom I and Sophie shared a middle name. Dove and Garnet got along, as Daddy liked to say, like two bobcats trapped in a burning outhouse.

“You knew she was coming,” I said, waving at acquaintances every few steps. There was no such thing as privacy at the fair. “Why are you panicking now?”

“I know she
said
she was coming, but I thought . . . well, to be honest . . . I prayed that she’d get sick.”

I stopped dead in my tracks next to the red, yellow and blue Hot Dog on a Stick kiosk. A young girl in blue shorts and a tricolored jockey cap was making lemonade by vigorously pushing a plunger up and down in a large barrel. “You prayed that God would strike your sister sick? Dove, I’m pretty sure that’s
not
what Jesus would do.”