Then he laughed at that, the same wet, surprised laugh from the garage a year earlier.
“When did you get so wise?” he asked.
“Had a good teacher,” I said. “Working through algebra he barely remembered, at eleven o’clock at night, refusing to let a fifteen-year-old quit.”
“Fair point,” he said. “Fair point.”
We rode the Ferris wheel twice that night, once as a whole family crammed uncomfortably into one car, and once just the two of us, Mom insisting we take a minute alone at the top while she wrangled Jonah and Lily back toward the funnel cake stand.
Jonah complained loudly about being left out of the “important sibling stuff,” which made Lily laugh so hard she nearly dropped her cotton candy, and the two of them were still bickering about it happily as Mom led them away.
From the top of that Ferris wheel, the whole county fair spread out below us in strings of colored light, and for a moment neither of us said anything at all.
