“We’re going to the fair,” I said to Josie hours before the Rip Current collapsed.

“Have fun,” she said, leaning on the back legs of a plastic patio chair with her feet on the table, phone resting on her thighs.

“Is it too much for you to spend some time with your family?”

That morning, when I told her we were spending Labor Day weekend with her grandparents, the yes-no ping pong match escalated into the I’m-your-father-you’re-only-sixteen declaration followed by a list of parental failures. She’d been the last of her friends to have her own phone, the last to get her driver’s license, and now she’ll be the only one to miss the day trip to the Jersey Shore. We never let her do anything. Why were we such buzzkills? That was her new one.

Josie’s palms wrapped around her phone, thumbs tapping the screen, draining our monthly data. I couldn’t believe my parents still didn’t have wi-fi.

“Come on, honey,” I said. “Don’t make me take your phone away.”

She sighed, rocked forward, stood, and stuck her phone in the back pocket of her jeans.

My parents had moved back to my dad’s hometown in Northeastern Pennsylvania and into a two-story cabin in the woods. I wasn’t thrilled either, but a little mountain air unplugged from corporate layoff rumors and boyfriends would serve the family well. It didn’t help that we let Nico stay. But he’s a five-nine, slue-footed special-teamer in the final season of his athletic career, who for the past three weeks had been studying game film, calculating food consumption, and tracking sleep. So I knew he wouldn’t fill the house with dozens of horned-up, booze-intolerant teenagers like I did whenever my parents went away. Like I knew Josie would have done. Boundary-pushing was a trait I was proud to pass on to her as long as it didn’t involve her and her friends drinking my IPAs.

I made sure Dad went to the bathroom before we packed into his Bronco, which smelled like it was leaking oil onto the gravel driveway. Rachel had to help Mom with her sweatshirt because the pinched rotator cuff from years of tennis caused pain whenever Mom raised her arm above her head. Dad traipsed around the side of the house, navigating a small patch of grass that was an inch and half higher than his usual summer preference. He wore a faded green t-shirt from his company softball team and ripped jeans, not because they were stylish but because he refused to buy a new pair.

Josie slammed the car door. She had her earbuds in, staring into her phone, doing god knows what. I glared over but Rachel put her hand on mine, patted it twice as if to tell me to let it go. Dad jiggled the key and pumped the gas until the Bronco’s engine sputtered to life, scattering a few hummingbirds around the feeder that Mom had replenished with sugar water. With the windows down, the cool evening air filled the car, and I stared at the abundance of trees in every direction, spotting herds of deer foraging in the brush on the side of the road.

The day before the Rip Current, I spent most of the morning in my office, monitoring the sun as it beat down on the parking lot and evaporated the overnight rain. I submitted my sales reports before lunch, told my boss I was going to Josie’s field hockey game, that I’d see him on Tuesday, and pulled out at half-past twelve with plans of an afternoon of golf. Maybe a hike. Josie’d be in for that. She had more time ever since she quit the team. 

But when I came home to rumbling footsteps and shushes upstairs, I knew the weekend was headed in a different direction. I opened the door to Josie’s bedroom, and her boyfriend, Mike, was sitting on the end of the bed with one of Josie’s Cosmos in his lap as if hiding the boner pushing through his gym shorts. Josie was leaning against a stack of pillows wearing baggy sweatpants and a tank top that looked like they’d been scooped from the floor. The comforter was pulling to one side, and the room smelled like dry-humping sweat.

“What the fuck, Dad.” Josie said.

“What the fuck—Dad?” I said, twisting the knob to resist my urge to grab Mike by his neck and throw him down the steps. “Time for Mike to go.” I left the door open, went downstairs, and poured a Jack with ice then called Rachel.

The road into town dipped and swerved past farmhouses selling antiques, eggs, jellies, and wood-carvings. At twenty-five miles per hour, we rolled through Lakeland, the length of a par-five with a church, a library, a restaurant, a beer distributor doubled as a tackle shop, and an abandoned hotel all sandwiched by a half-dozen auto repair shops with names like Fred’s, Ernie’s, and Sid’s that had cars in grass lots that hadn’t seen pavement in years. Dad followed a stream of cars behind the baseball fields and parked in a clearing next to a barbed-wire fence with cows grazing on the other side.

The sheriff stood outside the carnival entrance, greeting everyone by name. Ethel, Bill, Jane, the Thompsons, the Milligans. He was a lanky figure with gray eyes and a u-shaped hairline, and the belt that held his sidearm and ammo looked like it could slip off his waist.

“Evening, Carl,” he said to Dad.

“Good to see you, Kenneth,” Dad said before introducing him to Rachel, Josie, and me.

Dad and Carl’s dad had played basketball together. Lakeland High Class of ’62. Five-ten forwards. Not much of an inside presence but still averaged double-doubles their junior and senior years. Last time Lakeland made back-to-back appearances in states, they told me. Fifty-four out of eighty-seven from their graduating class came back for the fiftieth reunion. Dad was one of the few who’d made it out. Only to return after half a century in the suburbs.

The smell of deep fried batter and sugar drifted from a row of trailers with illuminated signs for funnel cakes, Oreos, and ice cream. The rides formed a giant circle around the fairgrounds with the Rip Current at the opposite end, a tall ship as high as the Ferris wheel that spun from a rotating fulcrum, rising until horizontal with the ground. I felt nauseated at the thought of spinning forty feet in the air with over two Gs of force pressing onto my skull. With all the years I played football, if I remember my name by the time I’m Dad’s age, I’d consider it a victory.

Dad wanted to check out the rides first even though he’d made it known multiple times that he wasn’t going on any. Josie mumbled something about why we’d come, and Rachel tugged her arm. We passed all the run-of-the-mill carnival rides and trailer games: bumper cars, carpet slides, swings, and a fun house mixed among the baseball pins, rings and bottles, spinning wheel, and rubber duckies. A crowd gathered at the air rifle targets with the steady rat-tat-tat of bbs piercing paper.

The carnies called on us as we passed, “Three for one, five for three, win every time.” The guy at the dart balloons called Josie “Sweetie,” and I stared into one of his eyes to express my disapproval. The other one was looking off to the side over by the pig race track.

Dad stopped at the basketball game with a display of knock-off Curry, James, and Durant jerseys hanging from a mesh netting.

“What do you say, guy?” the vendor said to Dad while holding an open gallon of Turkey Hill Iced tea. “Want to take a crack?”

“Why not?” Dad said. “Maybe I still got it.”

He pulled out his wallet, a bi-fold stuffed with random receipts that fell to the ground as he opened it, and handed the vendor a ten. “The kid’s going to shoot, too,” he said, sticking a thumb in my direction.

Dad went first, and the vendor laughed when he saw Dad crouch down with the ball below his knees as he prepared to shoot granny-style.

“What’cha doing?” the vendor said. “Praying?” He smiled, exposing a gap the size of a golf ball where his incisors and molars should have been.

Dad smiled back then drained his first shot.

“Damn,” the vendor said. “Gramps got game.”

Dad’s second hit the back of the rim, and the backspin pushed it down through the net. But I could tell his back must have gotten stiff because he left the third one short.

“Too bad,” the vendor said, handing Dad a keychain that Dad gave to Josie. “I was rooting for you.”

I hadn’t touched a basketball in years. I gripped the worn rubber, bounced the ball in the dirt, and twirled it in my hands then bricked the first two but hit the third, satisfied that my form had not abandoned me. Later, when we were over by the frog catapult game, the vendor practiced Dad’s technique with no success, shaking his head in disbelief. 

After games, I took Dad to the bathroom, a permanent wood structure used for the rotating schedule of Friday night rodeos and Saturday night demolition derbies. A man in a blue suit arranged a collection of mints, mouthwashes, and gum sticks by the sink, so I took the farthest urinal to avoid eye contact and peed into an Osama bin Laden target mat by the drain that said Shoot to Kill.

I zipped, flushed, and washed my hands then dried them with a towel the guy handed me. “Thanks,” I said and dropped a single into a small wicker basket.

“God bless you,” he said and handed me a pamphlet on finding Jesus. I put the pamphlet in my pocket and told him I was an atheist.

I stood by the pens of cows, sheep, pigs, and horses underneath a weather-stained pavilion, teetering back and forth on my heels and toes, questioning how much longer I should wait before checking on Dad. The smell of straw and crap intensified with the shift in the wind. Kids poked their hands through the wire fences then jumped back when the animals licked their fingers while the owners watched from lawn chairs around their pick-ups and trailers.

Dad finally came out with his fly unzipped and a dribble on his inner thigh. I pointed, and he winked and said “Whoopsies,” something I’d never heard him say in his life.

We met Rachel and Mom over by the funnel cake line.

“Where’s Josie?” I asked.

“Smoking weed,” Rachel said.

I huffed. “That’s funny.”

“When’d you get so uptight, Jimmy?” Dad said. This coming from the man who used to give me a time, a location, and a five-spot with the threat of a smack upside the head if I screwed any of that up.

After an hour of listening to the happenings of nearly every Lakeland resident and their distant relatives, Dad yawned, and I knew soon he’d be walking toward the exit without saying anything. That was his way of letting us know he was ready to go. We called it his Casper exit. Once, when the kids were younger, after circling the fair three times, Mom hysterical on the verge of filing a Missing-Person Report, we found him in the car.

 “One ride before we go?” I asked Josie when she returned with a box of popcorn.

“Fine,” she mumbled as if I’d asked her to clean the cow stalls. 

The carpet slide was always a big hit. The first years she rode on my lap as we dipped down the pink, blue, and yellow track in a double-stitched burlap sack, Josie screaming and clutching my legs after each drop. When she got older, we raced for hours with the loser performing an embarrassing stunt that graduated from eating peanut shells off the ground to wearing a face paint design of the winner’s choosing. Three years running, I walked around the fair as a cat, a skeleton, and a princess.

Josie loved the bumper cars, the two of us lassoed inside the sash of a seatbelt. I’d blindside the other drivers. Knocked some guy’s sunglasses clear off his head. Josie squealed when we’d bounce someone across their seat. She’d count my mashers. That’s what she called them. Like the potatoes. “Five mashers, Dad,” she’d say, clinging to my shoulder as we exited the car. It was eight, but who cared. I enjoyed watching my victims rubbing their necks on their way out.

I chose the Rip Current even though looking at it made the funnel cake in my stomach churn. We stood in line behind a group of teenagers. Half of the boys were wearing sleeveless shirts and camo pants, hair like they’d gone to my high school in ’87. The girls had on tank tops and jean shorts cut so high the bottom of their butt cheeks were exposed. Every other word was f-this or f-that. I was about to suggest a new ride when one of the boys turned to Josie.

“What’s up?” he said.

“A preposition,” Josie said. It reminded me of the way Rachel toyed with me the first time we’d met.

The boy blinked. “You want to ride with us?”

She looked away like she was pondering the offer.

I cleared my throat.

“Sorry,” Josie said. “I’m riding with my dad.”

He stiffened his lips and nodded. “How you doing tonight, Sir?”

“I’m good, partner,” I said. “You kids have fun tonight.”

His friends punched him in the arm. “You got burned,” one of them said.

Josie hid her embarrassment by leaning over the railing that faced the carpet slides while I watched the Rip Current come to a grinding stop. The exiting riders clutched their chests and took winded breaths as they staggered off the platform and down the steps.

The line moved, and the teens in front of us got on.

“Why do you always have to be like that?” Josie snapped.

“It’s called parenting.”

“It’s called annoying.”

I felt like telling her to get over it. My house, my rules or some other cliché Dad would have said to a teenage me.

Josie scrunched her eyebrows. I used to laugh when she did it as a little girl. Her mad face. I knew the explosion was coming.

The teens screamed across to each other as they hopped in the boat, taking up the front and back rows. The operator pulled on their seatbelts, and one of the boys yelled that he was trying to touch his junk. When the operator checked all of the riders, he scanned the rows with his finger and settled on an empty seat beside the boy who’d tried to talk to Josie.

“We got one more,” he called out to the line. “Any single riders out there?”

Josie stared, face frozen, as I pushed toward the front of the line, climbed onto the platform, and slid into the empty seat. I smiled and waved as if I were five years old riding the firetrucks for the first time.

It was beautiful. Exactly something I would have done to Dad.

She laughed then stepped out of line, nudging past the others who watched as the Rip Current groaned to life.

Greg Oldfield is a physical education teacher and coach from the Philadelphia area. His stories have appeared in Hobart, Barrelhouse, Carve, Maudlin House, and Porcupine Literary, among others. He also writes about soccer for the Florida Cup and the Brotherly Game often rambles about the game on Twitter under @GregOldfield21.