Chapter 6 - Part 2

I was still enjoying my cotton candy. I loved the way it looked like a big piece and felt like a big piece, but you put it in your mouth and the moment it touched your tongue it shrank down to almost nothing. Which just goes to show you that sometimes things are not as they seem.

“Where do you sleep in a carnival?” my dad was asking my mom and looking at her helplessly.

Tommy cleared his throat. He wasn’t used to talking to Dad unless they were having an argument. He was doing his best, though. “I saw some craft booths on the other side of the Tea Cup ride. Maybe one of them sells blankets or something.”

“Maybe. It’s a good idea, Tom.” Dad said, “Let’s go check it out.”

There were craft booths selling dream catchers and ones selling carved wood figures where the man’s face seemed to come swirling out of the wood. Next to a craft booth selling homemade pies, we found a booth selling blankets. Yeah! I thought. Tom was right! Although I knew he would be.

“This will work great, Sam,” Mom said to my dad and she set out right away to lay more blankets on top of the canvas floor to keep out the chill and then set out blankets for pillows and blankets for covering us again. It’s funny how really all you need for a good night’s sleep are a bunch of blankets. If you have the right tools, night can be heaven. If you don’t – without these simple strips of fabric – we would have had a miserable night. I don’t know what we would have done.

I cozied down in the pile mom offered to me. It had been a strange day. I thought of the family reunion and about the storm. I thought about Dad’s anger and how we had gone the wrong way and then we had found this carnival. We thought we had gone the wrong way, but as I snuggled deeper into the blankets, I knew in my heart that we had really come the right way. I knew the carnival was good for us. Already Dad wasn’t so mad and Mom wasn’t so scared. They looked at each other differently. Tom was different, too. He loved me. I smiled secretly to myself and with that thought drifted off to sleep.