Poor Stacey. The real reason he was awake an hour before the sun rose is because he’d slept fitfully. For years, he’d successfully kept his impulses locked tight in a securely padlocked box, so he could function as man and father day in and day out. Figuratively, the box itself was hand-carved by his own hands, ornate, a valued knickknack that blended in on a shelf full of them. The box had an iron lock and solid hinges that had stood the test of time doing their job. Somehow, on the Friday afternoon of the 1984 Memorial Day weekend, the lock rusted through or something, but enough to snap open. The box was actually not a knickknack at all, and he’d known what was inside all along because the box was really a crafted Stacey Ferguson Pandora box, a container full of flaws. …show more content…
The lock became nonfunctional, and he’d spent the night fumbling with it while battling the flaws at the same time. The battle was a futile one. No longer thinking abstractly, but literally, he could not get ‘ranger what’s his face’ out of his mind. He replayed the scene over and over. He even wondered at some point during the night if the ranger was actually a Dudley Doright ranger type, and might have been cornered Stacey for diplomatic questioning because he raised a red flag. After all, Stacey had come to the campground by himself with a young girl. But then it was fairly easy to notice that Arlene was out and about on the very same afternoon with girlfriends roaming separately from her dad, and wasn’t really threatened, nor did he look suspicious. No, and handsome ranger fell very quickly into an easy conversation that distanced himself from that line of thinking. Should he come to the conclusion that ranger man was as curious about him as he was about ranger man? Now that was perilous, dangerous