No Promises in the Wind by Irene Hunt

invited to see a bearded lady, a man with flippers instead of arms, a wild man from the jungles of Borneo. We passed shooting galleries and booths where the prizes for knocking down a sand-filled dummy were plaster dolls with enormous painted eyes or net stockings filled with candy.
    A clown on high stilts staggered toward us and fell in front of Joey. People nearby laughed when Joey tried politely to help the fallen figure and the clown suddenly sprang to his feet and pretended to trounce Joey as if my brother had been responsible for the fall.
    We shuffled through the curled wood shavings that covered the ground, inspecting and admiring everything around us. The whole scene made me remember when Dad had taken us to the amusement parks in Chicago long ago when I was little. The memory made me feel very lonely for a minute, but I fought away any such loneliness with a stubborn resolve not to remember anything good about Dad.
    After an hour or so we finally found a tent with the name Pete Harris painted on a placard above the opening. We went inside and found our man.
    He was a short, rather fat man, neither friendly nor unfriendly. He and Lonnie talked quietly together for a time while Joey and I waited at a distance pretending to be interested in the people who passed by. Then Pete Harris called us over to his desk. He told us that the waitress who had given us his name was indeed his cousin. He seemed to like her; I got the impression that he wanted to help us as a favor to her.
    It was plain, though, that he was worried. “I don’t know,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck with a big handkerchief. “To tell you the truth, I just don’t know how long this show is goin’ to hang together. Times ain’t good for havin’ fun. People ain’t lettin’ go of their money anymore; awful lot of people ain’t got any money to let go of. I don’t know whether I can afford to take on anybody more or not.”
    Lonnie was sympathetic. “I know. Company I haul for is laying off more drivers every week. May feel the axe myself, any time now. I know exactly how tight things are. Still, I wish you would at least hear the boy play. All of us in your cousin’s cafe that night last week were kind of amazed at how he got music out of an old piano that was ready for the junk heap.”
    Pete Harris kept on mopping his neck and frowning at me. Then he glanced at Joey, and his face relaxed a little. “Hi ya, sport,” he said, and he put his arm around Joey’s shoulders in the way that most people reacted to my brother. Then he turned to me again. “All right, come on. Won’t cost me anything to hear you play a little. Far as a job goes, though, I just don’t know.”
    He led the way, and we followed him inside a tent where a piano was shoved in among chairs loaded with a lot of ruffly-looking dresses, a couple of chests with open boxes of powder and hairpins on top of them, and any number of battered suitcases and hatboxes. I glanced at Lonnie and saw that he was anxious. Pete Harris looked tired and skeptical. He motioned me to the piano as if he wanted to get the playing over and be rid of me quickly.
    I played a few popular numbers, syncopating them with as much of a flair as I could. I tried to smile and look confident, patting my left foot lightly and swaying a little with the beat of my music. All the time I was thinking, “Give me a chance, Pete Harris; come on, give me a chance.”
    He drew his mouth down at the corners when I turned on the bench to face him. He looked at Lonnie rather than at me and nodded. “The kid’s not bad,” he said, reaching up to rub his head.
    Lonnie sat astride a chair facing the back. He looked nonchalant. I might have felt that he was bored with the whole thing if I hadn’t known better. “That’s right,” he said. “Josh handles that keyboard pretty well. I have an idea that a lot of