Free Twenty Grand by Rebecca Curtis

“It’s a pain in the ass.”
    I nodded.
    She leaned back, and closed her eyes.
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    B Y LATE J UNE , we didn’t have six hundred people a day. We didn’t have five hundred. For three days it rained, and when the sun came back the chairlift malfunctioned and for two days Jacques sold half-price tickets.
    My father tallied the gross income from three hundred customers a day on the back of our electric bill, subtracting estimated employee incomes and making various other columns under an all-caps heading, “OVERHEAD,” and concluded that Jacques couldn’t be making a profit.
    But I thought he was. He had an air of contentment. He spent every morning checking the mechanics of the slide, and he was especially careful about the sleds. He made the maintenance guys check every sled every day—Were the runners straight? Did the brakes work?—which seemed excessive, since each rider had to check the brakes before heading down, and you didn’t need a brake. A ride without brakes was a wild ride. We’d all done it, and we all had slide burn as a result. It was a strange wound. Only the first few layers of skin, whatever portion had skimmed the slide—usually the knees, or the backs of the arms, or thighs—and the burns didn’t bleed; they oozed pink fluid. They could be as large as a hand or as small as a dime, and they hurt, but only until the EMT in the emergency shack put the iodine on. Then they stung for an instant and pulsed for a few days. They faded to a slippery shine, a pale shade of lilac, and seemed to travel, so that months later you’d be looking for one, to show someone, and it would be somewhere else on your arm, somewhere different from where it had been. Or maybe you’d just remembered it wrong.
    Jacques caught me pushing one of mine with a thumb one day when I was working at the bottom of the slide. The day was slow, and everything smelled like heat: the slide, my skin, the dirt that slid along the ground in the breeze. Jacques grabbed my arm, glanced at the burn, and said that it was pretty good. Then he stood next to me and looked around the park. A group of maintenance guys were shuffling by on their way to the sled-repair shack, where they got high between jobs. Jacques watched them go. His feet were spread wide in the dirt and he crossed his arms over his damp shirt. Then he asked me which one of them I had a crush on.
    I looked at them. They were all gaunt, except for one, who had dark hair, a paunch, and a soft, dopey look. I shrugged.
    â€œI know,” he said. “I know.”
    I watched him walk off toward the waterslide. When he got there, he waved to the people by the pool, of which there were only two, because Amy Goldman and Dave Z. weren’t present. Jacques stopped in front of the closed office door. The mat was over the window. He stood there, looking at the mat, for about ten seconds. Then he turned around. He glanced at the chubby, sunburned lifeguard who’d stood up from his stool out of nervousness. “Wrong office,” he said. He turned when he was halfway down the ramp. “If you see Dave Z.,” he said, “tell him to stop by and see me.”
    Dave Z. wouldn’t tell anyone what Jacques said that day. But after that he made small talk with the customers, cleaned his nails when he thought no one was looking, and said “Please” and “Thank you” when he told us to do something.
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    O N THE LAST DAY of June we had a hundred and thirty-two guests. Jacques stopped me as I was delivering a box of cheeseburgers to the waterslide. His face was red from heat, and the fabric under his arms was yellow. He gestured to the people waiting to ride the lift. “You see this?”
    I nodded.
    His hand dismissed the line. “You’ll wish for this in July,” he said. Then he tugged his baseball cap down, put his hands in his pockets, and trudged toward the lodge.
    But when the