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I agreed so quickly because I knew she would change her mind at the last moment. Holly was shy, timid, and she usually avoided the more adventurous and perilous rides. Ordinarily, she was content to stroll through the park at my side while we made up stories about people passing by. She liked the merry-go-round and the distorted mirrors in the fun house and she was reluctant to attempt such daring exploits as the roller coaster or the loop-the-loop. For which I was grateful. Particularly on days such as this when my head pounded and my stomach revolted at the slightest movement.
    “How’s your mother?” I asked, the question ritual.
    Usually, the answer was ritual, too. “Fine” or “swell.” As if Holly’d received instructions. But today, she hesitated, sighed, and said: “Tired.”
    “Tired?” I was searching for a parking place in the busy Wonder World lot.
    “Oh, she’s been on a committee to get blood donors—”
    That was Alison. Conscientious and community-minded and always willing to help. She had a desire for service to others and she dearly loved Monument and had no wish to venture to other places. Which was part of our trouble, or at least the beginning of it all. I had always regarded Monument as a starting point, not a destination. Alison and I had met the summer I’d been planning to leave, ready to knock on a thousand doors in New York City, seeking a job, something, anything—just to get away. But Alison had been so beautiful and I had loved her so incredibly that I’d remained in Monument, writing obituaries and other equally dismal stories for the town newspaper. However, I was always aware of the world outside of Monument and I had wanted to see it, to know a million people, visit a million places, all of which was ridiculous, of course, and eminently impractical. Sometimes, my frustration would burst out. “Alison,” I’d plead, “let’s try, let’s pack up and take our chances. I don’t mean go to the other side of the world. But somewhere. The world’s so big and Monument’s so small, our lives are so small—”
    Alison had held up little Holly, who smiled at me in her infant innocence. “Is she so small, too, that you can’t be a father to her?”
    Defeated, I remained in Monument but spent more and more time away from that confining claustrophobic apartment. In a bar or cocktail lounge, there were kind shadows and when you’d consumed just the right amount of beer or rye or whatever, all the sharp edges blurred and Monument itself receded. Inevitably, if you go oftenenough to a bar, a girl walks in. And, finally, Sally arrived. She was a member of a television unit dispatched to Monument by a Boston station to capture, on tape, the one-hundred-fifth birthday of Harrison Shanks, the oldest man in the county. Sally and I had a drink or two; she confessed that she was only a secretary for the film crew, an errand girl, really. Laughing, she reversed the cliché and wondered what a fellow like me was doing in a place like that. Meaning Monument, of course. She leaned against me warmly, a frankness about her body. Alison hid herself in tailored suits or loose, comfortable sweaters while Sally wore clothes that made me constantly aware that she was a woman. Sitting beside her on that first night, before I had said two dozen words to her, I felt as though I had known her body before, probably in a thousand adolescent dreams.
    The television people were in Monument only two days. I served as their unofficial guide, arranging the interview with Harrison Shanks, who sat bewildered in a wicker chair on the porch of his ancient house, croaking monosyllabic answers to the inane questions placed by the interviewer. “How does it feel to be one hundred five years old?” The old man, confused by time and place, kept muttering about the banks closing and Herbert Hoover, which caused a few laughs and quips off camera, and I felt myself tightening inside. Someone pressed my