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half-moons with smiling, top-hatted ladies on them.
    She picked up a watch, shook it, and heard a distant faltering tick. She wound it, but it stopped then, one hand falling inside the scratched face.
    Her mother's wedding ring was there too, a thin band of gold where there once had been three small diamonds, now only three spaces with prongs sticking up hollow. She looked inside the band and could make out some writing there. Painfully, she spelled it out: "P.D. to D.D., 11-12-39, L.O.V.C."
    "Love?" Boy, that sure didn't sound like her father. Maybe that's what they always wrote on wedding rings.
    She'd seen every piece of the jewelry; Dorothy had let her play with it to keep her quiet. But Dorothy had loved jewelry. Why hadn't she taken it with her? Especially her watch and her wedding ring?
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    Lureen yelped as her finger hit the pin to Dorothy's favorite brooch, a large enameled dogwood blossom with a pink stone center. Sucking the drop of blood away, she carried the brooch to the bathroom mirror and adjusted it at the neck of her blouse. She could almost see her mother's face stare back at her from the mirror, remember how Dorothy had worn the pin just as she did now.

    Puzzled, Lureen put the candy tin back on the shelf. She'd never seen her mother's jewelry around during all the time since she'd gone away, even though Lena had had her sewing things out in the living room often. So the pins and necklaces must not have been there before. If Dorothy had come home to visit, she would surely have waited to see Lureen. She wouldn't have gone away again without seeing her own daughter. It didn't make sense. Maybe Dorothy had left without her jewelry and Lena had hidden it from Lureen all these years, and then the old ladies had put Dorothy's things in the sewing tin after Lena died.

    Trying to figure it out made her jumpy; she could reason it only to a certain spot and then her thoughts dissolved and she had to start all over again. She couldn't concentrate on the television. She poked around in the refrigerator looking for something to eat even though she didn't feel hungry anymore, but all she could find was an end of cheese with a fuzzy green patch growing on it, and a bowl of something she didn't recognize. She craved something sweet, like a
    "short-chocolate" at the drugstore. It wasn't a short-chocolate-something; it was just ice and milk and chocolate syrup. The girl at the counter had laughed when, wanting a double-size, she had first asked for a "large-chocolate," instead of a large
    "short-chocolate."

    She dug down in the couch cushions and found a quarter and three pennies, and that was enough. There were probably more coins down there, but she needed to be outside quickly; sometimes, walking seemed to help her think better. But Lureen walked slowly along the Old Lincoln Highway—Main Street—and passed up the drugstore without seeing it.

    She didn't realize that the blocks were melting away

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    behind her. She had walked more than two miles in the failing light when she heard the sounds of the carnival. She looked up to see that the field next to the used car lot on the west end of Main Street was filled with tents and rides; a ferris wheel circled above the street, festooned with lights. Caught in the crowd, Lureen walked past the booths and the freak shows. It was so bright that her eyes hurt, and the music made her ears hum. Her vista on the world had been a twelve-inch screen for so long; now it made her dizzy to be shoved along the sawdust path of the midway.
    Every stall seemed to have its own music, and a few steps past took her into another channel of sound. The night air smelled of fried onions, hamburgers, chicken corn soup (from the American Legion booth), submarine sandwiches, smoke, beer, and sometimes an acrid wafting of whiskey on the breath of men who nudged her shoulder as they passed. She saw people she recognized, faces from school, and some nodded. But no one stopped to talk to her.