State Fair (4 page)

“You’re so lucky to have Dove,” she’d said, sitting across from me at the round wooden snack table. She was dressed in jeans, hiking boots and a gray sweatshirt she’d hand painted with bright Van Gogh-style flowers. There was always something unique about the clothes she wore, some bit of lace or embroidery or grouping of antique pins that turned her simple clothing into little art pieces. “Both my grammas are gone. Bad hearts, just like my mom.” She sighed, poked a nail-bitten finger into her whipped cream.

Jazz’s mother, Ruth, a red-haired Irish woman, died of congestive heart failure when Jazz was four years old. I’d met Ruth a few times but didn’t remember much about her. Jack and I had been in our twenties, newly married and didn’t hang around the same young parents’ crowd as Jazz’s mom and dad.

I reached across the tiny table and patted her hand. “Yes, I was lucky. But you’ve got a wonderful dad and lots of other people who care about you.”

She gave me a wide, heartbreaking smile. Her oval face was perfectly formed and her downy milk chocolate hair twisted into two pig tails. “Yeah, I know. I have Dad and Uncle Jim and Aunt Oneeda and all the ladies in the Ebony Sisters Quilt Guild. I shouldn’t whine, I guess.”

“Oneeda adores you. She always talks about what you’re doing. And Jim’s just as proud of you as if you were his own grandchild.”

Jim Cleary was one of Gabe’s captains at the police department, the one with whom I had no doubt Gabe would trust his life. I’d met Jim and Oneeda when I started dating Gabe. She and I immediately took to each other. More than anyone else, she helped me understand what it would mean for me to marry a police officer. She’d had multiple sclerosis for as long as I’d known her but never let it stop her from enjoying life. Her flannel lap quilts, given to anyone who came across her path whom she felt needed comforting, were that much more beautiful because of the effort it took her to make each one.

“Aunt Oneeda’s the best storyteller,” Jazz said. “She tells stories about back in the day when white people made her drink from a different water fountain than them. She said even I wouldn’t have been able to just drink anywhere and I’m half white!” She wrinkled her nose. “Not that I’d drink from any kind of fountain. Think of the bacteria! Gross! Thank goodness we have bottled water now.”

“It
is
hard for us living in 1997 to imagine.”

Jazz stared down into her half-finished cocoa. “Do you think my mom and dad had it hard here in San Celina?”

Her father, Levi Clark, was the county fair’s general manager, the first African American to hold that position. He’d started out cleaning restrooms at the fair when he was eighteen, a Cal Poly college student studying business administration. Now he was in charge of the entire Mid-State Fair.

I wasn’t certain exactly how to answer her. “I don’t really know.”

“Dad says Mom really had a temper and wasn’t afraid to tell people what she thought.”

I smiled at her. “She and I would have gotten along just fine.”

Behind the cash register at the folk art museum booth, I wasn’t surprised to see Jazz had everything under control. She’d been essentially running the household for her and her father since she was tall enough to turn on the oven.

“I came by to see if you need help,” I said, “but looks like you are doing fine.”

She grinned at me, took a woman’s fifty-dollar bill, made change and handed her three red and black Drunkard’s Path pot holders. “Thanks,” she told the customer. “Please, tell all your friends! Get your Christmas shopping done.”

“How are sales,” I asked, “or is it too early to judge?”

“They’re super! We might have to ask the artists for more things if this keeps up. Items under ten bucks are selling fastest, but I sold three fifty-dollar crib quilts today. And the black cloth dolls? Totally flying off the shelf.”

“The Ebony Sisters will be happy to hear that.”

All the money earned from the dolls was going to a rural charter school they’d adopted in Mississippi. Even the artists’ co-op, which normally received 10 percent of whatever the artists sold to help with operating expenses, was donating their profits from the dolls to the school.

“So, where are you headed?” she asked, restacking some fabric eyeglass cases.

“To the Bull Pen and then over to the Family Farm exhibits. I’m dying to see what the families have come up with this year.”

The Family Farm exhibits began years ago as a good-natured competition between the farm and ranch families in San Celina County. Each family was given a hundred-square-foot area to decorate and promote their farm or ranch. It was intended to be a fun competition primarily for kids, but the tone gradually changed when adults started becoming a little too involved in creating the exhibits. The last few years it had evolved into a somewhat silly, egotistical contest of one-upmanship. It was amazing what people dreamed up every year and even more amazing how whoever won or didn’t win caused such resentment. First prize was a picture of your exhibit on the front page of the
San Celina Tribune
, a dozen free passes to the fair and a two-hundred-dollar Farm Supply gift certificate. The winners also won bragging rights, which meant a lot in the ag community.

“Did you enter?” Jazz asked.

I shook my head no. “Too many other irons in the fire this year. Besides, it’s really more fun if there are kids involved.”

“I helped Maggie and Katsy with their exhibit,” Jazz said. “We made papier-mâchés of a bull and two cows. Maggie and I machined-quilted a Hen and Eggs quilt and draped that over the bull’s back. Then we painted a big wood board with all these old African American cattle brands, including their own great-grandpa’s.”

I smiled at her enthusiasm. I’d been working with Katsy on the African American quilt exhibit at the museum for almost a year. When she wasn’t ranching or managing a clothing store in San Celina, she taught two classes of American history at San Celina Community College. We combined the quilt exhibit with a smaller exhibit of rare black cloth folk dolls from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in our smaller upstairs gallery. They were on loan to us from a collector in Oakland who was a friend of Katsy’s.

“How’s your dad doing?” I asked. “I really should drop by his office and cheer him on.”

There had been a fierce competition for the fair’s general manager position. Though many people applied, some not even from our county, Levi got the job. But even though Levi was immensely qualified with his long years of experience and MBA in business, there’d been uneasy murmurings that a little unspoken affirmative action had taken place.

“I guess nothing bad enough to tell me about,” she said, placing her hands on her hips. “But you know my dad. He tries to protect me too much.”

“A daddy’s prerogative.”

“I’m nineteen. According to the law, that’s a grown-up.” Her bottom lip stuck out in a pout that made her appear about fourteen.

“He knows that. Let him baby you a little longer. Otherwise, he’s going to have to admit to himself that he’s trotting briskly into middle age.”

“He’s forty-eight,” she said, her tone practical. “That’s only middle age if you live to be ninety-six.”

“I suggest you don’t voice that particular observation until after the fair. Right now, he likely feels closer to ninety-six.”

I glanced at my watch as I headed toward agriculture building no. 1. It was almost 1 p.m. My eggs Kiwanis sandwich had been hours ago and my stomach was primed to partake again of fair food. I stood in line at Mustang Sallie’s trying to decide between deep-fried artichoke hearts with ranch dressing or just jump ahead to dessert and buy a fried Snickers.

“That stuff’ll kill you,” a male voice whispered in my ear. I turned to face my friend and nemesis, Detective Ford “Hud” Hudson of the San Celina Sheriff’s Department. He wore faded Wranglers, black cherry- colored cowboy boots and a gray fitted T-shirt that asked in red lettering Who’s Your Crawdaddy? Born and raised in Beaumont, Texas, he was proud of his half-Cajun, all-Texan heritage.

“Turn blue,” I replied in my perkiest voice.

He removed his white Stetson and placed it over his chest. “Ranch girl, that’ll be what happens to you if you continue eating that crap.”

I turned back to the menu. “Gabe’s nagging I have to endure. Yours, no.”

“So, how’s the old chief doing these days?” he asked. “Emphasis on old.” He and Gabe had grudgingly become civil to each other over the last year, but Hud could never resist a poke at my more serious-minded husband.

“Too busy, but aren’t we all? What’s new with Maisie?” Maisie was Hud’s eight-year-old daughter and the reason he left his beloved Texas to live in California. Despite their divorce, he and his ex-wife, Laura Lee, were on amicable terms. She’d moved here to be near her family and he followed. Hud could be irritating as a rope burn, but he was a dedicated father.

“She’s showing her first chicken,” he said proudly. “Not officially, of course, since she won’t be nine until next January.”

You had to be nine years old to be an official 4-H member and show your animals, but she could be in mini 4-H, where they let kids experience the process without being eligible for either a ribbon or to sell their animal. “What kind of chicken is she raising?”

One of his brown eyebrows arched with contempt. “It’s some kind of fancy rooster or something. A Frizzled Coachman?”

“A Frizzle Cochin,” I corrected him, laughing. “Those are real pretty birds. What color?”

“Plain ole white. Ugly as a rotten tree stump, if you ask me. A chicken is a chicken. All it makes me want to do is dig out the frying pan. Let me tell you, I have
sacrificed
for this bird. First, he cost me an arm and two legs from some loony-tunes chicken breeder in Bakersfield. Apparently this baby rooster—”

“Cockerel.”

“What?”

“That’s what young roosters are called.”

“At any rate, this cock-in-the-rail apparently has a royal bloodline, which is why he cost so dang much. Second, he conveniently can’t live with Laura Lee and Maisie because of their neighborhood’s zoning laws. So he and I are roommates. I swear my house is full of bird mites despite the fact I built him a fancy-pants chicken coop at the very back of my yard. After the fair, that cockamamie bird is history.”

“Really? You realize that she can show him again next year when she can actually win a ribbon?”

“No way. Another whole year with Mr. Prickles?”

I laughed. “Mr. Prickles?”

“She thought he looked prickly. I tend to shorten his name by a few letters.”

He groaned just as I reached the front of the line causing the kid behind the counter to give him a confused look.

“Ignore the crazy man,” I told the kid. “I’ll take one deep-fried avocado and a lemonade, please.”

“Good girl,” Hud said. “Eating your veggies.”

“Mind your own,” I said without turning around. After he ordered a raspberry lemonade, he fell in beside me while we walked toward the agriculture buildings.

“So, ranch girl, what should I do?”

I took a bite of my fried avocado, burning my tongue. “Ow.”

“Serves you right.”

We passed in front of the row of instant-picture booths, which, I noticed, now cost three dollars and were in color. I had dozens of the old black-and-white strips, the kind that cost a quarter way back when, tracing Jack’s and my courtship from age fifteen to right before he was killed in an auto accident at age thirty-four. The fair always made me think of Jack.

“Hey, we’ve never had a photo together,” Hud said, grabbing my hand and pulling me into one of the booths.

“Hud! I don’t have time . . .”

“Hush and smile,” he said, slipping bills into the slot. “Or you’re going to look like a fish.”

Humoring him, I’d found, was the quickest way to shut him up. As we waited for the photos and I ate my fried avocado, I brought up Mr. Prickles again. “I think you’re going to have to just be the great father you are and suffer with Mr. Prickles until her interest moves on to something else.”

The photo machine beeped and coughed up the photo strip. In the third photo, he had given me devil horns.

“You are so predictable,” I said, punching his upper arm. “Gotta run. I want to see the Family Farm exhibits.”

“I do want to be a good father,” he said, sticking the photo strip in his shirt pocket. “Why couldn’t Laura Lee encourage her to make a quilt or jam, something less noisy?” He scratched the side of his sunburned neck, his face miserable.

“Walk with me to the agriculture building and I’ll tell you a story that’ll make you feel better. My first 4-H project was a sheep. I named him Moses.”

“Moses? What kind of sheep name is that?”

I waved my hand at him. “That’s who we were studying in Sunday school. Anyway, keep in mind that I was raised on a ranch. I knew before I even acquired Moses that a castrated male sheep served no purpose except for being on someone’s dinner plate. Moses won Grand Champion Market Lamb that year. When it came time for him to be auctioned off with the other lambs, I ran to Daddy, crying hysterically. It suddenly dawned on me what was going to happen to Moses. I couldn’t bear for Moses to be lamb stew. So, with me hanging on his arm bawling, he started bidding.”

Hud listened intently, for once his dark brown eyes serious. “Then what happened?”

We reached the front door of the agriculture building. A small crowd of children wearing bright orange Beth David Preschool T-shirts stopped us.

“Sorry,” said a frazzled young woman trying to maneuver them into two lines. She wore a T-shirt identical to her charges. “We’re three parents short.”

“No problem. We’re not in a hurry.”

“Moses,” Hud prompted. “What happened?”

I turned back to him. “Oh, Daddy bought him for an exorbitant price, mostly because his Farm Supply buddies saw what he was doing and kept jacking up the bid. We brought Moses home where he lived for sixteen more years. Dove said I should have named him Methuselah. And Daddy got razzed every week of his life of those sixteen years, not just because he was feeding a basically worthless animal, but also because it was a
sheep
and Daddy’s a cattleman. But he took it on the chin.” I cocked my head. “Because he’s a good daddy and I think you are too.”