Dark. Driving the country road on the way home to the city from her daughter’s, there was the county fair: Ferris Wheel, Tilt a Whirl, Fun House, lights a riotous invasion of a farm field.

Her daughter had told me she was pregnant again. Two children in two years. She didn’t need three. She had a part-time job as a bank teller. Her husband drove a delivery truck. They grew their own vegetables, cut their own hair.

Her daughter wanted her to move in with them before the new baby, be a babysitter, be with family as she got old, add her social security to what they had. Better for everyone, her daughter said. There was a little shack behind the run-down farmhouse. It has potential, her daughter said. It could be cute. It’s not impossible.

Without really deciding to, she turned into the field and parked her Honda between two pickup trucks. She walked with a cane, her hip unreliable, the footing uncertain−trampled field grass, but she paid, went in under the bright arc of lights.

The Midway booths were busy with people throwing balls across a raft of fish bowls, knocking down ducks with spouts of water, shooting deer. Both grown-ups and children clutched cheap stuffed bears, carried flimsy plates of funnel cakes. A marvelous vibrancy.

She wasn’t so old. Sixty-nine. She saw friends, kept her condo tidy, her car serviced, was a docent at the art museum.

Her daughter had been the valedictorian in high school, went to college in New York on a debate scholarship, met her husband when they both worked in a restaurant, and got pregnant and then again and now again.

She stopped to play Skee Ball, set her cane against the machine. A twenty, some thirties and forties, a fifty. An impossibly long coil of tickets curled out of the machine. She gave them to a little boy, the parents smiling. Say thank you, Quint. The boy hopped up and down, too overjoyed to say anything. She did like children.

Her daughter’s husband was skinny, bearded, gentle, liked to tumble around on the floor with the kids, read philosophy. He might have been a computer programmer and her daughter might have been a lawyer if they’d given themselves some time. They might yet, if they could catch a break. They were young. Thirty.

For some reason the basketball booth, usually popular, had no one. Its keeper wore a caftan and a white kufi, a Muslim at the Tucker County Fair. He wasn’t trying to bark people in. He was reading a Robert Ludlum thriller.

The man glanced up, saw her walking by. “Here, here,” he said, trying to wave her in. “Basketball. See. See basketball.” He picked up a red, white, and blue ball. “You can do it. It’s not hard.” He threw the ball easily into the hoop, caught it and threw a lay-up to show her everything that was possible.

– Dawn Abeita

Author’s Note: Two themes I’ve been thinking about lately are reflected in this very short story: the pull of family and invisibility. In this story, both the older woman and the immigrant are made invisible by their appearance but so are the young people who have chosen family over prosperity – at least in the short term.