The thing they had to move was a painted wooden screen. It had been meant to hide the portable toilets from the tables by the lake. Instead it had spent two days showing people where to find them.
“They keep walking behind it,” the woman in the purple shirt told Kit. “One of the vendors said it looks as if we're screening an exclusive toilet.”
“We could charge,” Kit said.
“We are not going to charge. Put it over there.”
She pointed to a patch of grass beside the end of the concession row. The screen was made of three hinged panels painted with enormous blue waves. Somebody had added smiling fish. One fish had only one eye, not because it was in profile but because the artist had apparently lost interest.
Kit looked at Leah. “You busy?”
They took an end each. It was heavier than it looked, and at the first lift the middle tried to fold around Leah's knees. She pushed it back with her hip and laughed, startled. Kit laughed too. For a second they were trapped in a painting of the lake.
“Not toward me,” Kit said.
“I'm not doing it on purpose.”
“That's what makes it exciting.”
They lowered it, rearranged themselves and tried again. This time Leah listened when Kit told her where to hold. They got it off the ground and carried it in a slow awkward procession, stopping twice for people who could have walked anywhere else. A boy holding a frozen drink stared at the fish until his father pulled him away.
“Are we nearly there?” Leah asked.
“About six miles.”
“Feels like seven.”
They set it down in the shade behind the last trailer. Kit straightened and pressed both hands against her lower back. Leah bent, hands on her knees, waiting for the little burst of pain in her own back to decide what it intended.
“You okay?” Kit asked.
“Old.”
“You're forty-four.”
“Thank you for checking.”
Kit rubbed sweat off her forehead with the hem of her shirt. The scrape above her eyebrow had gone dry and red. Leah wanted to touch it again. She looked at the painted fish instead.
“He looks worried,” she said.
“He's only got the one eye. Can't see what's coming.”
They stood for a moment beside the screen. The little patch of shade belonged to nobody important. From here the main stage was hidden by trailers, and the noise of the crowd came over them softened by canvas and wood. A strip of lake was visible between a fence post and the end of a refrigerated truck. People worked all day within sight of it without looking.
Kit sat on a low curb. Leah hesitated, then sat beside her. The concrete was warm even in the shade. For the first time in hours there wasn't an object either of them had to carry.
“I used to think you'd made the waves,” Kit said.
Leah turned.
“Not those. The actual ones. In the boat when I was little. You'd say, Here comes one, and then there was one.”
“You must have been very little.”
“I was. Then I got older and found out you only made traffic.”
Leah smiled. Kit took a bottle of water from the bag at her feet and offered it. Leah drank, handed it back. They had shared cups all their lives without thinking, then gone months without being in the same room.
Kit pulled out her phone. For a moment Leah thought she would call Walt. Instead she opened a photograph and enlarged it with two fingers. It showed a bird standing on a parking meter, its chest puffed out, one claw around the edge of the metal cap. A gull, or some smaller thing she didn't know. The picture was slightly blurred.
“I took this outside my apartment,” Kit said.
“He's getting a ticket.”
“He's issuing them. Look at his face.”
Leah looked. He did appear to be having an official morning.
Kit swiped to the next picture. It was a drawing of the same bird on lined paper, unfinished around the feet. The meter was better than the bird, exact about its little slot and scratched glass. Around it were notes from something else: a shopping list, a time, half a number.
“I keep meaning to do it properly,” she said.
“It's good.”
Kit's thumb stopped on the screen.
Leah nearly added that she should enter something, that there were places she could send it, that somebody Nell knew taught classes. The offers lined themselves up so readily it frightened her. She could have built a whole plan before Kit finished taking a breath.
“Do you like doing it?” she asked instead.
“Yeah.”
Kit looked at the drawing. “I think I'd like to go somewhere and be bad at it for a while. One of those evening classes where everybody's drawing the same bowl. There'd be a man who took it really seriously, and somebody who only came because her friend made her. I'd draw a bowl that looked like a hat and go home.”
“You used to get furious when it didn't look right.”
“I know. That's why I want to be bad at it with witnesses.”
Leah laughed softly. Kit put the phone down on her knee.
“Not a business,” she said. “Not a thing to get good enough at so I can sell it. Just a bowl.”
Leah nodded.
She had asked Kit about qualifications, bookings, winter work, money. She had not asked what she would like to do on a Tuesday evening if nobody was paying her. It would have been possible to know that. Kit had been in front of her for years, drawing on envelopes and receipt pads while Leah made calls.
A forklift beeped somewhere beyond the trailers. Both women looked up, the work reflex so similar they noticed and smiled.
“You like this bit?” Leah asked. “Not the bowl. The work.”
Kit leaned her head against the fence behind them. “Sometimes. When it goes right. When something starts and I know who made it happen. Sometimes I want to put everyone in a bag and leave them by the road.”
“That's most jobs.”
“I know.”
The little stage's music stopped. Applause came in a scattered burst, then a voice through a microphone thanked the audience, naming a sponsor Leah had never heard of. Kit listened with her head tipped, counting something Leah could not hear. Then she relaxed.
“On time,” she said.
“You did that?”
“Some of it.”
She sounded pleased without needing to claim the whole thing. Leah remembered saying she had built Mercer Roadside herself. As if Nell hadn't answered the phones, Denny hadn't worked Christmas, Kit hadn't sat in an office after school doing homework beside a box of zucchini or whatever somebody had brought them that week. She could see how irritating it must have been.
“Nell used to draw you while you slept,” Leah said.
Kit looked at her. “What?”
“In the office. You'd fall asleep on the chair and she'd sketch you on the backs of invoices. She said you held your face funny when you were dreaming.”
“Why didn't you tell me?”
“I forgot. Until now.”
“Does she still have them?”
“I don't know.”
Kit nodded, accepting it as a thing they didn't know instead of a thing Leah had failed to arrange. They sat with that small shared ignorance, and it did not hurt anybody.
Mara found them in the shade with two plates of fish and potatoes. “You moved my van,” she told Leah, “and she found my lemons. Eat.”
She went back to her trailer before either could refuse. Kit squeezed lemon over her fish and passed the slice to Leah. They ate while the next band set up. The painted screen stirred in the breeze. Leah steadied it once, then let go.
“I liked today,” Kit said.
Leah looked at her. She could hear Walt's invitation in the pocket of her jeans, the phone ready to vibrate again.
“Which part?”
“Before you ask what I learned.”
Leah smiled. “I wasn't going to.”
Kit raised an eyebrow, and Leah laughed because she wasn't sure.
Kit's radio crackled. The purple-shirted woman wanted to know where she was. Kit answered, “Finishing the fish. Two minutes.”
“The screen or your lunch?”
“Both.”
“I've got a volunteer going off shift in ten. Take over the south lane until Beth gets here.”
“Got it.”
Kit put the radio down and finished eating. From beyond the trailer came the steady pulse of a drum check. She listened, counting against it with her thumb.
Leah rubbed her greasy fingers on a napkin and looked at the lake. A boat went across the narrow gap in their view, white, blue, then gone. She could have missed it if she had blinked.
Her daughter bent to put the empty plates into the bag. Leah stayed still long enough to let her finish. When they got up, Kit offered her a hand. Leah took it. Her knee cracked, loudly enough for both of them to hear, and Kit made a sympathetic face that was entirely false.
“I can put you in a cart,” she said.
“Try it and I'll bite you.”
They carried the trash out together. At the end of the concession row the sun came around the trailers and hit them full in the face. Leah squinted. It was later than she had thought. The crowd had thickened, the gaps between families filling with people who had arrived for the evening. Somewhere a child was crying because somebody had thrown away the wrong cup.
Kit stopped to answer a question from a volunteer, then another from a man carrying a cooler that had to go back to his vehicle. She told him where he could find water inside, waited through his protest, and thanked him when he finally turned around. Leah watched the man leave. He wasn't especially pleased with Kit, but he had done what she asked.
“How do you keep doing that?” Leah said.
“What?”
“Not getting mad.”
“I get mad. I just let it get past me first.”
She pointed Leah toward a strip of shade where she could wait while the shift changed. Her own face had lost its private ease and become available to strangers again. Leah stood there watching her daughter work until she was needed elsewhere.
Walt called as the lights along the concession row came on. They looked unnecessary in the daylight, little bare bulbs over food and people's heads. In another hour they would be the thing that made the place look festive.
“We're still on the same time,” he said. “Rosa's with me. You coming back to the truck?”
She could see the flatbed across the staff field, its white cab higher than the parked cars. She could see Kit too, leaning toward a woman who was pointing to something on a map. Her daughter nodded, gave an answer, and made the woman smile.
“In a little while,” Leah said.
She ended the call and put the phone away. Kit looked up and found her. She raised a hand, one finger held up for another minute, and Leah waited.