When I felt she was waiting for some type of response, I said, “So you’re saying kids have no respect?”
Under the quiet tones of a talk radio station I had forgotten to silence she said, “You making fun of me?”
“No, I just … I think you’re right. The older they get, the more damage they can do.”
She didn’t say anything to this, and I couldn’t help but think about Mona. I often wondered how much she knew at seventeen, what things she recalled and what things she had decided to let go of. She was in her own world most of the time, but that didn’t mean she didn’t surface when she wanted to. And though I always asked, half the time I didn’t really know where she went at night even when she told me, or who she was dating, or what she spent her time photographing. She didn’t show me the way she showed her mother.
Liz subscribed to this psychology magazine, and she once read aloud to me from an article on secrets. It said that keeping family secrets is as common as getting up in the morning. I asked Liz what she thought, and I was surprised when she dropped the magazine by the bed and said, “I think telling secrets, well, some secrets anyway, can be more harmful than holding on to them.” I didn’t say anything, and right after that she shut off the light and we went to bed, much as I couldn’t sleep thinking about this idea.
“You imagine you’ll go back?” I asked Linda. “When things calm down?”
“You must be crazy,” she said. Then she released her seatbelt and shifted things around and got her dog out of the carrier. He was a scrawny, trembling thing without much hair, and she placed him under her sweater, right over her belly, where he settled. She called someone on her phone and said she was a couple of miles away and to meet her at the diner.
When we pulled into the parking lot, there was a man idling in a pickup painted flat black, with rims the size of Pennsylvania. He was smoking a joint and just sat there, not helping, while she and I loaded her stuff onto the bed in the rain. I didn’t know if this was a brother-in-law or her boyfriend or what. She didn’t make any introductions. When we were done we covered her wet things with a blue plastic tarp he had up in the cab. But as soon as they pulled away the tarp flew up into the air and landed in the lot, and they didn’t bother to circle around to get it.
I stood there in that desolate country, the rain coming down, wondering how I was going to put things right with Mona. I wished in that moment that my Uncle Sorohan was around. No one had a better sense about people than he did and what kind of secrets it’s best to keep. I didn’t know how long Mona would keep hers.
Uncle Sorohan was a professional guesser on the carnival circuit and that meant he could tell your age within two years, your weight within three pounds, your birthday within two months. If he guessed wrong, he handed you a prize. But he rarely guessed wrong. He told me once I would wander. I never imagined this would be away from Liz and the girls.
Sor hired me to help out the summer I turned sixteen. Guessing had him on the road from one end of the country to the other, early spring to late fall in an old Chevy, and he said he liked having someone along. The Chevy pulled an Airstream with a special rig off the back that hauled a giant scale. He always got us to the next show before the break of day, nursing a flask.
The first time I saw his booth in a midway, it looked like a cartoon with question marks dancing at its edges. It was painted red and yellow, and it looked as bright as a burning city. Centered at the top was a sign that read, Fool the Guesser. Stuffed animals hung in clusters and were perched on shelves at the back. The Howe industrial scale verified his accuracy. “You have to know who’s going to put their money down,” he told me, “and who’s going to be a repeat customer, and who’s going to grab their friends and bring them back here thinking they’ll cheat you.”
In mid-July, after being on the road for six weeks, we stopped outside Chicago, a few towns over from where my family lived. It was one of the bigger carnivals where we had a weeklong stint. I didn’t even tell my parents we were in town, I was so happy to have my freedom. Sor let me try my hand at guesswork but I kept handing out prizes. Finally he said, “Guessing someone’s age within two years means two years on either side of the year they were born in, so you’re giving yourself a five-year span to work with. It’s not that hard.” Once that sank in and I discovered where he hid the flask, I began to relax.
He helped me understand bone mass: how a lump of fat in the upper arms will tip the scale, something about weight lifters and their light heads. He showed me how to assess pockets filled with keys and wallets and how a pair of work boots can be loaded with steel. “Look for yellowed fingers and stained teeth,” he said, pointing out particular lines in a face to show me the way a smoker could throw me off on age and how heavy coffee drinkers lose water weight and get a sunken look in their cheeks.
I thought birthdays were the toughest, but he said, “In time you’ll start to see the sunny disposition of the summer baby, the spectral look of the autumn born, the rapid talker of spring, the perennial sadness of winter’s child. I have books on Chinese face reading, body language, palmistry, and clothes psychology and fabric composition. You’re welcome to borrow any of them.”
His favorite author was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and each night he read one of Sherlock’s adventures aloud to me from his bed as if I were a young boy. He slept on two facing couches that pulled together in the trailer, and Sor’s deep voice drifted over to the nose of the Airstream, where I bunked. He had a fedora he never took off, even when he slept.
“You’ll just know. You won’t have to think about guessing after a while. I’ll admit there’s a letdown to seeing what’s behind the curtain, Richard, but you’ll get over that and find other kinds of letdowns waiting for you,” he said, and then he laughed.
While most people who came to that carnival outside Chicago thought he was paying a quick compliment and taking their tickets, he was reading them to their cerebellums. One day as two girls were eyeing the booth he nudged me and said, “Your turn.”
They were about my age and one had a high laugh, a smile that showed her full gums, and a body as thin and light as smoke.
The other was the beauty with true brown hair pulled into a ponytail. She wore a short skirt with a tank top and gym shoes. She didn’t use a lot of makeup and had a way of sizing up every last thing around her. When her eyes mirrored the streaming, flashing lights of the park, she made all the other carnival goers who had come from the city look dull and habitual.
She was holding a paper dish with a sugary lump of fried dough when I blocked her path. “I can guess your weight within two pounds,” I said.
“Before or after I eat this fried dough?” she said, staring me down.
“Both,” I said.
“But can you tell the hour of my birth?” she said, looking smugly at her friend.
“If you tell me your name,” I said.
Sor coughed to let me know I was heading out on a fragile limb. The friend tugged at her arm, eager to push on. But the beauty laughed and said, “Elizabeth. Don’t forget to include the time zone.”
I knew from taking tests in school that it was better to fill something in than leave it as blank as my mind was at that moment. And I knew from Uncle Sor not to overthink things and that sharp-minded types are often born in the late hours of the evening or early morning.
“Eleven thirty-three p.m. Central Time,” I said. “If I’m wrong, I’ll hand you a prize.” Her friend gave me a sour look. “I’ll give you two prizes,” I said, and Sor spit on the ground.
Elizabeth knit her eyebrows together, and then something seemed to change and she looked at me with a kind of wonder I wish I had a photograph of and said, “Aren’t you clever? Only off by a minute. Eleven thirty-four.”
I wanted to ask if I was really all that close when she said, “If you guess my phone number next time, I’ll let you