My daughter wouldn’t let go of the stuffed rabbit she’d won at the ring toss, even after three older boys RIPPED it out of her hands.
She’s seven, and she’d been saving her tokens all week for that booth.
The boys were maybe thirteen, fourteen. Laughing. One of them held the rabbit above his head while Becca jumped for it, her sneakers worn through at the toe.
I was twenty feet away with a tray of lemonades, and I couldn’t get there fast enough.
The fair worker at the ring toss booth watched the whole thing and turned around to restock rings.
I set the tray down hard on a picnic table and started moving.
Then he got there first.
Big guy. Leather vest, patches, arms like dock rope. He just stepped between Becca and the boys and stood there.
He didn’t say anything at first.
One of the boys said, “Whatever, it’s just a stuffed animal.”
The man said, “Give it back.”
Two words. That was it.
The boy dropped the rabbit.
Becca picked it up and pressed it against her chest and didn’t look at anyone.
The boys left. The man crouched down to her level and said something I couldn’t hear. She nodded.
By the time I got there my knees were shaking.
I said thank you about four times. He waved it off.
His name was Curtis. He had a granddaughter about Becca’s age.
We sat at a picnic table while Becca ate a funnel cake and I tried to stop my hands from doing that thing they do after something almost goes wrong.
Curtis said, “She didn’t cry.”
I said, “She never does. That’s the part that gets me.”
He looked at Becca a long moment.
Then he looked back at me and said, “THOSE BOYS COME HERE EVERY SUMMER.”
I went still.
“Fair management knows,” he said. “I’ve filed three complaints.”
The fair worker who’d turned his back was walking toward us now, pointing at Curtis.
“You need to leave,” he said. “We’ve had complaints about you harassing minors.”
Curtis didn’t move.
He reached into his vest pocket and put a folded paper on the table.
“That’s complaint number four,” he said. “Dated today. Cc’d to the county sheriff and the fairground’s insurance carrier.”
The worker’s face changed.
Becca looked up from her funnel cake and said, “He didn’t harass anybody.”
From somewhere behind us, a woman’s voice said, “I got the whole thing on video.”
The Woman With the Phone
I turned around.
She was maybe sixty, gray hair pulled back, wearing a county fair volunteer lanyard and holding up her phone like evidence. Which it was.
“All three of them,” she said. “From when they grabbed it to when they dropped it. And you.” She looked at the fair worker. “You turning around. All of it.”
The worker’s name tag said Dale. Dale looked at Curtis. Then at the woman. Then at me, like maybe I was going to help him.
I was not going to help him.
“I’m going to need to get my manager,” Dale said.
“You do that,” Curtis said.
Dale left. He walked fast, not quite running, in the direction of a row of trailers behind the food stalls. The kind of walk that means someone knows they made a mistake and is hoping distance fixes it.
The woman with the phone sat down at our table without being invited. She introduced herself as Pam. Pam Doyle. She said she volunteered with the fairground’s lost-and-found every summer and had been watching those boys for forty minutes before they made it to the ring toss booth.
“They hit the balloon darts first,” she said. “Grabbed a prize there too. Kid maybe nine years old. His dad was in the porta-potty line.”
Becca was listening. Not pretending to eat her funnel cake anymore, just listening with powdered sugar on her chin.
“Did that kid get his prize back?” she asked.
Pam looked at her. “No, honey. He didn’t.”
Becca nodded slowly, like she was filing that information somewhere important.
What Curtis Knew
I asked Curtis how he knew to have a complaint already written up. Already printed. Folded in his vest pocket like he’d been carrying it all morning.
He had.
He told me he came to this fair every year. Had for about twelve years, since his daughter’s family moved to the county. He knew the layout, knew the workers, knew which booths ran short games and which ones were straight. He said it like someone reading off a grocery list, just facts, nothing dramatic about it.
The three boys, he said, were brothers. Ranged from about eleven to fifteen. He knew their last name but didn’t say it out loud. Their parents had a seasonal vendor booth at the fair, sold kettle corn, and management gave the family a lot of slack because they’d been coming for years too.
“Slack,” I said.
“That’s what I’d call it,” Curtis said.
He’d watched them take things from four different kids last summer. Filed two complaints then. One the summer before. Each time, management told him they’d look into it. Each time, nothing.
This year he came prepared. He’d talked to someone at the county sheriff’s office in June, before the fair even opened, and asked what documentation would make a complaint actionable. The deputy had told him. Curtis had written it down and built his form around exactly that.
He pulled out his phone and showed me the email thread with the sheriff’s office. Three months of it.
I didn’t know what to say.
He put his phone away. “Wasn’t sure I’d need it,” he said. “Hoped I wouldn’t.”
What the Manager Said
The manager’s name was Gary. He came out from behind the trailers with Dale behind him, and Gary had the look of a man who’d been interrupted from something he’d rather be doing. Thick neck, sunburned, a walkie-talkie on his belt that was probably decorative.
He looked at our table, took in Curtis, took in Pam, took in me and Becca.
“I understand there was an incident,” he said.
Curtis pointed at the paper on the table. “Complaint number four. You can read it.”
Gary didn’t pick it up. “Curtis, we’ve talked about this. You can’t go putting your hands on guests.”
“I didn’t touch anyone,” Curtis said. “You can ask the woman with the video.”
Pam raised her phone.
Gary looked at it. Didn’t ask to see it.
“Those boys are guests of a vendor family,” he said. “They’re kids. If you have a concern you come to staff.”
“I came to staff three times,” Curtis said. “Your staff turned their backs.”
“I turned around to restock,” Dale said, from behind Gary’s shoulder.
Nobody responded to that.
Becca said, “He’s lying.”
Gary looked at her like he’d only just noticed a seven-year-old was sitting there covered in funnel cake sugar and holding a stuffed rabbit.
“Sweetheart,” he started.
“He watched,” Becca said. “I saw him looking. Then he turned around.”
Pam held up her phone again. “It’s in the video.”
Gary’s walkie-talkie made a noise. He silenced it without looking at it.
“I’m going to need everyone to calm down,” he said.
Curtis hadn’t raised his voice once. I hadn’t raised my voice. Pam was sitting with her hands folded on the table. The only person who’d come in loud was Gary.
“We’re calm,” I said.
The Part I Keep Thinking About
Gary took the complaint form. He said he’d review it, which we all knew meant he’d put it in a drawer, except this time the form had a cc at the bottom to the county sheriff and the fairground’s insurance carrier, and he knew that we knew that he knew what that meant.
He left. Dale followed him.
Pam said she was going to send the video to her nephew, who did something in civil law, and asked if I wanted a copy. I gave her my number.
Curtis finished his coffee. He’d had a cup of fair coffee this whole time, just sitting there, and I hadn’t even noticed him get it.
He said he should get going. His daughter’s family was meeting him at the livestock barn at two.
I said thank you again. He waved it off again, same as the first time.
He stood up and looked at Becca.
“You know what you did right?” he said.
She thought about it. “I didn’t let go.”
He nodded. “You held on.”
He walked off toward the livestock barn. Leather vest, patches, arms like dock rope, coffee cup in one hand. He didn’t look back.
After
We stayed another two hours. Becca went on the Tilt-A-Whirl twice and won a second prize at the duck pond, a little foam frog she named Gerald.
She carried the rabbit in one arm and Gerald in the other for the rest of the afternoon.
On the way to the car she asked me if Curtis would come back next year.
I said I thought he probably would.
“Good,” she said.
That was it. She climbed in the backseat and buckled herself and looked out the window at the fairground lights coming on in the early evening, and that was the whole verdict on the day as far as she was concerned.
I sat in the driver’s seat for a minute before I started the car.
Pam sent me the video that night. Forty-three seconds. You can see Dale watching. You can see him turn. You can see Curtis step in, the two words, the rabbit falling.
I’ve watched it maybe fifteen times.
Not for the part where it almost goes wrong.
For the part where Becca picks up the rabbit, presses it to her chest, and doesn’t look at anyone. Just holds on. Like she already knew it was going to be fine, even when I didn’t.
I forwarded the video to the county sheriff’s office with Curtis’s complaint number in the subject line. Pam’s nephew sent a letter to the fairground’s insurance carrier on Monday.
I don’t know what happens next.
But complaint number four has a lot of company now.
—
If this one got you, pass it along. Someone out there needs to know Curtis exists.
For more stories about parental instincts kicking in, check out The Drawing on My Daughter’s Tablet Stopped Me Cold or read about The Biker Was Watching My Son Before I Even Saw the Problem. You might also appreciate My Daughter Had Stage Three Cancer. Then I Found the Same Denial Letter in a Stranger’s File.
