Free Personal Touch by Caroline B. Cooney

Green.
    That was okay. I was rather hoping for something special to happen also.
    Closing up was easier said than done. People came in faster than we could shovel them out. Mrs. Lansberry hovered next to me. Over and over again she said, “Oh, I wish I could help. I wish I knew how to do anything at all!”
    Finally my father just closed the front door and refused to let anybody else in. Every time we let someone out he pulled the door to very quickly. It was like putting a litter of kittens outside. They kept wanting back in.
    Finally panting, exhausted, and more than ready for whatever goodies Mrs. Lansberry had packed, we locked up and I took one end of a cooler and Tim took the other and we staggered down a crowded street toward the Green.
    “I don’t believe how many people there are,” said my mother. “We’ll never find a spot. We’ll end up having to sit in the alley behind the bank or something just to find a place to sit down.”
    How depressing! I didn’t want to have this super picnic sitting on asphalt.
    “Don’t worry,” said Mrs. Lansberry. “I put out a blanket and chairs hours ago under that great big maple tree by the War Monument. I’ve been going back to check on it and it’s perfectly safe. Nobody’s taken it.”
    “What a woman,” said my father.
    Mrs. Lansberry flushed with pleasure.
    Now my father says that to my mother probably ten times a day the year round. But somehow with Mrs. Lansberry, I had the feeling that she wasn’t used to compliments, even one as dull and meaningless as “What a woman!”
    The picnic spot was perfect. We were in the shade, on soft thick cool grass, while all around us the ebb and flow of thousands of eager, excited fair-goers were like a marvelous movie filmed just for our benefit. Mrs. Lansberry had three folding chairs for the adults and two fat cushions for Tim and me. I wanted to thank her for such thoughtful arrangements. That way they could converse on their level, and Tim and I, sprawled on the ground, could converse on ours.
    The food was absolutely scrumptious. We kept telling Mrs. Lansberry and she kept wiggling and flushing with pleasure like a little girl.
    Tim and I talked. Not about anything in particular. Just nice, comfortable talk. We speculated on how much money the costumed juggler was making when he passed his hat. We made wisecracks about a couple wearing outsized cowboy hats and boots. We debated the pros and cons of buying raffle tickets for the handmade quilt and the color television. We did not debate the merits of buying a raffle ticket on the car. We knew we wanted to win that. It was an old Volkswagen Beetle that had been remodeled with one of those fiberglass kits so that it now resembled some sort of squished-in 1920s car, complete with running boards, exterior horns, and funny old protruding headlights. Tim tried to estimate how many raffle tickets would be sold and what the odds would be in his favor if he bought twenty-five tickets.
    Mrs. Lansberry kept reaching into the depths of her baskets and coolers and coming up with yet more delicious stuff.
    “Do you remember,” said Tim, “that first time I tried to start a fire for barbecuing?”
    Did I remember. It was the beginning of the legend of TIM, Terrible Infuriating Monster.
    Tim had been determined to start the fire for the hamburgers by rubbing two sticks together, the way he’d read that frontiersmen always started their campfires. He began about five in the evening and was still rubbing at ten o’clock when his parents had long since broiled their supper in the stove and were begging him to go to bed. He tried maple twigs, pine sticks, oak, tulip poplar and willow and all the rubbing he could manage, and nothing happened. Finally around one o’clock that morning Tim began screaming happily, “Fire! Fire! Fire!”
    The fire department, summoned by a terrified neighbor, was not amused.
    Tim and I lay on the blanket and laughed helplessly.
    This summer is