The crowd parted around the four of them without knowing why.
The midway was wide enough for people to flow around trouble when trouble announced itself in the body language of strangers, and body language was all anybody needed. The woman did not move from where she had planted herself under the spinning lights. The little boy clutched the stuffed bear and leaned half behind her leg, then peered around it with the solemn curiosity of a child who has been told someone matters before he has been allowed to decide whether they do. Linda stood between a popcorn wagon and a ring-toss booth with the strange sensation that the fair had become a stage she had somehow wandered onto without a script.
The woman looked at the boy and softened first only for him.
“Say hi to Daddy, Cam,” she said, her voice tired rather than theatrical. “He can hear you.”
The boy swallowed and looked down at the dirt a second, toeing the edge of one sneaker inward. Then he looked back up and, with the bravery children borrow from adults when they want something badly, said, “Hi, Daddy.” His voice was shy at first, then steadier. “You said we could ride the big wheel next time.”
Linda turned to David so fast her neck tightened.
“David,” she said, and already her voice was wrecked. “Look at his mouth. Look at his eyes.
Do not look at me like I am crazy.” The boy had David’s mouth. Not exactly the shape of it at rest, but the way one corner pulled slightly more than the other when he spoke, a little inherited asymmetry Linda had kissed absentmindedly for twenty-four years. He had David’s eyes too, the same hazel-brown ringed in darker color, and something else worse than likeness: he watched with David’s particular stillness, as if he were preparing himself not to ask for more than the room would give him.
David lifted a hand, not toward the child but toward the air, as if the right gesture might slow the collapse.
“Not here,” he said, and his voice already sounded broken. “Not in front of him. We will go to the car.”