Maybe she works for him part-time, I think with sudden optimism. Maybe I can get into the ranch with her, pretending to be her assistant—

“Sorry, hon.” Mary-Jo’s voice interrupts my thoughts. “We don’t see a lot of him. Hey, Patty?” She turns to the woman at the bar. “These folks are after Raymond Earle.”

“We don’t see a lot of him,” says Patty, shaking her head.

“That’s right.” Mary-Jo turns back to us. “We don’t see a lot of him.”

“Oh well. Thanks anyway,” I say, deflated. “Could I have apple pie, please?”

“He’ll be at the fair tomorrow.” A hoarse voice comes from the corner, and I turn to see an elderly guy with a beard and a proper cowboy shirt with those metal collar tips. “He’ll be showing his pots and such.”

Everyone at the table swivels round in excitement, even Minnie.

“Seriously?”

“Will he definitely be there?”

“Where’s the fair?” Luke inquires. “What time does it start?”

“It’s up at Wilderness.” Mary-Jo looks surprised. “Wilderness County Fair. I assumed that’s why you folks were in town. It’s going on all week, you can’t miss it.”

“And Raymond will be there?” persists Mum.

“He’s usually there.” The bearded guy nods. “Exhibits his pots in the ceramics tent. Charges silly dollars. No one buys ’em, far as I can make out.”

“Y’all should go, if you’ve never been,” says Mary-Jo with enthusiasm. “It’s the best fair in the state. You got the livestock show, the pageant, the line dancing….”

Line dancing? Oh my God, I’ve always wanted to do line dancing.

I mean, not that we’re here to do line dancing. I shoot a guilty look at Suze, in case she read my thoughts.

“OK, this sounds like a plan.” Luke is addressing the table. “We stay overnight, hit the fair first thing, find Raymond in the ceramics tent, and pin him down.”

There’s a huge air of relief around the table. At last, Mum’s anxious frown has melted away. Let’s just hope this Raymond character comes up with the goods, I find myself thinking. Otherwise, we really will be at the end of the road, and I don’t know what I’ll do with Mum.

—

The next day I awake full of optimism. Wilderness County Fair, here we come! We slept at the Treeside Lodge, Wilderness, last night, which had a big cancellation and was very glad to have some last-minute visitors. Janice and Mum had to squash into one tiny room, which isn’t ideal, but it was that or the RV.

Every other guest at the lodge is here for the fair, which we discovered at breakfast. The other families were all wearing WILDERNESS COUNTY FAIR T-shirts and baseball caps and talking about their plans for the day, and the excitement was contagious. I googled the fair last night, and it’s huge! It has a zillion tents and stalls, plus a rodeo, livestock shows, and a huge Ferris wheel. According to the map, the ceramics tent is situated in the northwest of the fair. It’s near the best-decorated sheaves tent and the clogging festival, while nearby is the rodeo arena, which will hold the wild-cow milking, the pig scramble, and the mutton bustin’.

It’s like a foreign language to me. A whole tent for decorated sheaves? How do you decorate a sheaf, anyway? And what’s “clogging”? And what on earth is a pig scramble? Let alone mutton bustin’?

“Luke, what do you think mutton bustin’ is?” I say, looking up from the laptop.

“No idea,” he says, putting on his watch. “A mutton-eating competition?”

“Mutton-eating?” I make a face.

“There’s an Oreo-stacking contest, in case you’re interested,” he adds. “Saw it on the website last night.”

Now, that sounds good. I think I might be rather brilliant at stacking Oreos. I can already see myself presiding over a ten-foot stack, beaming at the audience as I receive first prize, which is probably a packet of Oreos.

Not that we’re going to enter the competitions, I hastily remind myself. We’re here for business. We’ll probably only stay for half an hour.

“Ready?” I say to Luke, as he reaches for his wallet. “Ready, Minnie? Ready for the fair?”

“Fair!” shouts Minnie joyously. “See Winnie-the-Pooh!”

Hmm. This is the trouble with taking your child to Disneyland. They then think all other fairs are Disneyland too, and it’s no use trying to explain to a two-year-old about branding and copyright, like Luke did last night.

“We might see Winnie-the-Pooh,” I say, just as Luke says, “We won’t see Winnie-the-Pooh.”

Minnie looks from Luke to me, confused.

“We won’t see Winnie-the-Pooh,” I amend quickly, just as Luke says, “We might see Winnie-the-Pooh.”

Argh. Every parenting book says the most important thing you can do is present a united front, otherwise your child gets confused and starts to exploit the differences between you. Which I do totally believe in, but it can be a challenge. There was one time when Luke said, “Mummy’s just going out now, Minnie,” when I’d changed my plans, and rather than contradict him, I went out of the front door, shouting, “Byee!” then climbed back in through a window.

(Mum said I was totally mad and that parenting books cause more harm than good, and she and Dad never bothered with all that nonsense, and, “Look how you turned out, Becky.” Whereupon Luke made this stifled noise and then said, “No, nothing,” when we all turned to look at him.)

I’ve dressed Minnie up in her little blue jeans and a new fringed suede vest, which Luke bought her yesterday, and she looks absolutely delicious: a proper Western girl. I’m wearing shorts and a sleeveless top and I’ve glanced at myself in the mirror and…I look fine. I’ll do.

Somehow I can’t get excited about what I look like anymore. I’m waiting for some bit of my brain to click in—the bit that would normally go: Woo-hoo! County fair! What’s the perfect outfit for that? But it doesn’t. It’s silent.

“Ready?” says Luke, at the door.

“Yup.” I force a smile. “Let’s go.”

It’s fine. Whatever. Maybe I’m just finally growing up.

As we arrive down in the lobby, everyone is assembled and there’s an air of anticipation.

“OK, so we’ll head straight for the ceramics tent,” Luke addresses the group. “Jane will approach Raymond, along with Becky, with the rest of us on standby.”

There was a bit of a tussle last night about who should accompany Mum to accost Raymond. Janice reckoned she was Best Friend, but I countered with Daughter. Then Suze suggested, “Couldn’t we all go?” but got shouted down. Anyway, I won, on the grounds that whatever Raymond says about Dad, good or bad, Mum and I should hear it first.

The only person who wasn’t remotely interested in meeting Raymond was Alicia. In fact, she’s not even coming to the county fair. She says she’s arranged a meeting in Tucson. A meeting in Tucson? I mean, honestly. Who arranges meetings in Tucson?

Well, I suppose people who live in Tucson do. But, you know. Apart from them.

I don’t believe this “meeting in Tucson” story for a minute. Alicia’s up to something, I’m convinced of it. And if I could, I’d keep tabs on her. But I can’t, because: 1. I have to go to the fair, and 2. She’s already left for the day in a limo.

Suze is sitting on a chair made out of a barrel, hunched over her phone, frantically texting. Presumably she’s texting Alicia, because they’ve been apart for, like, twenty minutes. She looks absolutely deathly, and I want to put an arm round her or shake her out of her cloud of misery. But I don’t even dare approach her. Not only is Suze not my three-A.M. friend, I think dolefully, she’s not even my nine-A.M. sitting-five-feet-away friend.

“OK?” Luke interrupts my thoughts. “Everyone ready? Ready, Jane?”

“Oh, I’m ready,” says Mum, with a meaningful, almost ominous look. “I’m ready.”

—

We hear the fair before we see it. There’s music blasting as we snake along in the queue to the RV park. Once we’re parked we have to buy passes, and then we have to find the right entrance, and we’re all quite hot and bothered as, finally, we make it through Gate B.

(You’d think Gate B would be next to Gate A. You’d think.)

“Goodness!” says Janice, as we all look around. “It’s very…fulsome!”

I know what she means. Everywhere there’s something bright or blaring or plain extraordinary. There are tents and stalls as far as the eye can see. Every loudspeaker seems to be playing a different tune. A blimp above us in the sky reads WILDERNESS COUNTY FAIR, and beneath it soar a couple of helium balloons, silver dots against the blue, which must have been let go by mistake. A troop of cheerleader-ish girls in aquamarine costumes is hurrying into a nearby tent, and I can see Minnie watching them in awe. A man leads a massive woolly sheep past us on a rope, and I instinctively take a step back.

“Bex!” Suze rolls her eyes. “It’s only a sheep.”

Hmph. She may say “only a sheep.” But that animal has huge curly horns and an evil eye. It’s probably the prizewinning exhibit in the killer-sheep event.

The air is full of mingled smells—fuel, animal dung, roasting meat, and the sweet pungent aroma of freshly made doughnuts, which is particularly strong, as we’re standing right by a doughnut stand.

“Cake!” says Minnie, spotting the stall. “I like it, Mummy.” She tugs on my arm yearningly, almost pulling me over.

“No cake,” I say hurriedly, and start leading her away. “Come on, let’s find these ceramics.”

Even though it’s early, there are already crowds of people everywhere: clustering to get into tents, queuing for food, wandering along the lanes between the attractions, and suddenly stopping to consult their fair maps. So it takes us a little time to make it all the way to the Creative Village, and then we can’t work out which tent we want. Mum is totally focused, barging along, her chin set, but Janice keeps getting distracted by exhibits, and I have to tug her away, saying, “You can look at the embroidered pot holders later.” Honestly, she’s worse than Minnie.