“Hey!” Vincent shouted.
George continued forward.
“Hey, hop-along! Where you heading?”
A few people turned. Somebody laughed. Denny grinned into the microphone, delighted to have found another scene.
“You don’t want a chance at the money, old-timer?”
George’s pace did not change.
“Keep walking, Sadie,” he said quietly.
“Is he talking about you?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
Vincent gripped the fence. “Probably best to keep moving, Grandpa. I’d hate to break your other leg in front of that little girl.”
The laughter grew. Not from everyone. A woman holding a stroller frowned and moved away. A man in an oil-company cap shook his head but said nothing. Plenty of people remained to enjoy it. A crowd did not need every member to be cruel. It needed only enough people willing to treat cruelty as a joke.
George felt Sadie’s hand tighten around his fingers.
He had spent years teaching her that being teased did not require an answer, that some people wanted nothing more than an argument and could be disappointed safely by refusing one. He knew that advice was good. He also knew how much harder it became when the target was somebody you loved.
“He’s being mean,” Sadie whispered.
“He is.”
“You didn’t do anything.”
“No.”
“Then why is he doing it?”
George looked down at her. Her green eyes were full of tears she was trying desperately not to spill. The expression took him back to the hospital corridor when Elena had died. Sadie had looked at every adult’s face for an explanation, and found only people who could not make the world behave.
That resemblance, more than the insult, stopped him.
He told himself afterward that he had turned because the man was insulting his daughter. There was truth in it. He turned because he hated the way the crowd laughed. Because the pain in his knee made him vulnerable to the suggestion that he was a burden. Because the rent was due. Because a thin stack of paper in Denny’s hand had begun to seem like an answer to a question that had tortured him for weeks.
He turned for all those reasons, and some of them were better than others.
Denny raised the microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, we might have ourselves a volunteer.”
George looked through the fence at Vincent. The younger man was smiling as though the evening had finally become interesting.
“You offering a thousand if I put you down?” George asked.
Vincent spread his hands. “If you’re still standing by the time I finish.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
The smile faltered a fraction. Denny cut in brightly. “It’s the challenge, friend. Ten-dollar entry, standard rules.”
George glanced at the money. He looked at the open gate. And then, because his daughter’s hand was still inside his, he looked at Sadie.
The cost of the choice stood in front of him, wearing cheap sneakers and an uncertain expression.
Chapter Five: Ten Dollars at the Gate
“Dad, please don’t.”
Sadie said it before George had moved another step. Her voice did not carry beyond the two of them, but it landed harder than anything Vincent could have shouted.
George knelt, carefully lowering his weight onto his left leg. The right knee refused to bend far enough to make the movement graceful. He hated that he noticed. He hated more that Sadie noticed him noticing.
“Listen to me,” he said. “I’m not angry at that man.”
“He is angry at you.”
“Maybe.”
“Then we should leave. That’s what you always say.”
There it was: the exact sensible answer he had taught her. For a moment he felt an almost overwhelming desire to stand, take her hand, and walk until the fairground lights were behind them. He could face Richard on Monday. He could call Nolan. He could find an emergency shelter, perhaps. He could do something other than this.
But the calculation in his head kept returning to the same cruel place. The rent. Sadie’s school supplies. The electricity. The fact that one thousand dollars was not abstract money to him but a sequence of doors that might remain open.
“We can go,” he said. “If you want to leave, we leave.”
Sadie blinked, surprised by the offer. She looked at the cage and then at the crowd. At the young fighter holding ice to his nose. At the people who were waiting for George to make a fool of himself.
“Will he keep making fun of you?” she asked.
“Probably for a minute. Then he’ll find somebody else.”
“He shouldn’t.”
“No. He shouldn’t.”
George did not tell her he could win. He did not tell her that being a Marine made him invincible. He knew too many men who had died for him to believe such things, and his knee had been reminding him of his limits for fifteen years.
“The money would help us,” he said finally. “A lot. But it doesn’t mean I have to do anything stupid.”
