Joyland

on several occasions, and with no cause. I’m sorry.”
    “Mrs. . . . Miss . . .” Shit. “Annie, you don’t have anything to apologize for.”
    “Yes. I do. You could have just walked on when you saw me struggling with the kite, and then Mike wouldn’t have gotten that good night’s rest. All I can say is that I have problems trusting people.”
    This is where she invites me in for supper, I thought. But she didn’t. Maybe because of what I said next.
    “You know, he could come to the park. It’d be easy to arrange, and with it closed and all, he could have the run of the place.”
    Her face closed up hard, like a hand into a fist. “Oh, no. Absolutely not. If you think that, he didn’t tell you as much about his condition as I thought he did. Please don’t mention it to him. In fact, I have to insist.”
    “All right,” I said. “But if you change your mind . . .”
    I trailed off. She wasn’t going to change her mind. She looked at her watch, and a new smile lit her face. It was so brilliant you could almost overlook how it never reached her eyes. “Oh boy, look how late it’s getting. Mike will be hungry after his PE, and I haven’t done a thing about supper. Will you excuse me?”
    “Sure.”
    I stood there watching her hurry back down the boardwalk to the green Victorian—the one I was probably never going to see the inside of, thanks to my big mouth. But the idea of taking Mike through Joyland had seemed so right. During the summer, we had groups of kids with all sorts of problems and disabilities—crippled kids, blind kids, cancer kids, kids who were mentally challenged (what we called retarded back in the unenlightened 70s). It wasn’t as though I expected to stick Mike in the front car of the Delirium Shaker and then blast him off. Even if the Shaker hadn’t been buttoned up for the winter, I’m not a total idiot.
    But the merry-go-round was still operational, and surely he could ride that. Ditto the train that ran through the Wiggle-Waggle Village. I was sure Fred Dean wouldn’t mind me touring the kid through Mysterio’s Mirror Mansion, either. But no. No. He was her delicate hothouse flower, and she intended to keep it that way. The thing with the kite had just been an aberration, and the apology a bitter pill she felt she had to swallow.
    Still, I couldn’t help admiring how quick and lithe she was, moving with a grace her son would never know. I watched her bare legs under the hem of her skirt and thought about Wendy Keegan not at all.

    I had the weekend free, and you know what happened. I guess the idea that it always rains on the weekends must be an illusion, but it sure doesn’t seem like one; ask any working stiff who ever planned to go camping or fishing on his days off.
    Well, there was always Tolkien. I was sitting in my chair by the window on Saturday afternoon, moving ever deeper into the mountains of Mordor with Frodo and Sam, when Mrs. Shoplaw knocked on the door and asked if I’d like to come down to the parlor and play Scrabble with her and Tina Ackerley. I am not at all crazy about Scrabble, having suffered many humiliations at the hands of my aunts Tansy and Naomi, who each have a huge mental vocabulary of what I still think of as “Scrabble shit-words”—stuff like suq, tranq, and bhoot (an Indian ghost, should you wonder). Nevertheless, I said I’d love to play. Mrs. Shoplaw was my landlady, after all, and diplomacy takes many forms.
    On our way downstairs, she confided, “We’re helping Tina bone up. She’s quite the Scrabble-shark. She’s entered in some sort of tournament in Atlantic City next weekend. I believe there is a cash prize.”
    It didn’t take long—maybe four turns—to discover that our resident librarian could have given my aunts all the game they could handle, and more. By the time Miss Ackerley laid down nubility (with the apologetic smile all Scrabble-sharks seem to have; I think they must practice it in front of their mirrors), Emmalina Shoplaw was eighty points behind. As for me . . . well, never mind.
    “I don’t suppose either of you know anything about Annie and Mike Ross, do you?” I asked during a break in the action (both women seemed to feel a need to study the board a looong time before laying down so much as a single tile). “They live on Beach Row in the big green Victorian?”
    Miss Ackerley paused with her hand still inside the little brown bag of letters. Her eyes were big, and her thick lenses made them