It was the Fourth of July.  A hot, humid Sunday in Athens, Tennessee, and most of the town was gathering at Athens Regional Park for the festivities right after church services.  But this wasn’t just any Fourth of July; it was the Bicentennial, the 200^th anniversary of the birth of the United States.

The events scheduled for the celebration included speeches by prominent local leaders, performances by regional bands, and host of other smaller stage presentations.  There would be a town picnic, games, sack races and an ice cream social.  People would lounge in their lawn chairs talking politics in particular, as the contentious presidential election was looming, as well as sports and hunting, fishing, and farming.  Families would come and go from lunch time on until later that evening around 8:30pm, when the Rotary Club would put on their expansive fireworks exhibit, lighting up the sky for miles, filling the air with thunderous booms and bangs.  And for this special Fourth of July they planned two large finales of fireworks while one of the local high school bands played patriotic music.   It was a big event in itself, but every Fourth of July celebration also heralded in the county fair that would begin weeks later in that very same park, and most of the town’s children looked forward to the day realizing that only weeks away they would be riding the carousel, eating cotton candy, and playing games on the midway.

Most of the children except Tina Kennard. 

She didn’t care for the Fourth of July and hadn’t for the last three years.  Some of it was because she always had to work, but mostly it was because the sound of fireworks unnerved her.

So this day found the young girl, not at the park with everyone else, but sliding out from under cars and trucks changing oil or up on a milk crate hunched over an engine pulling out spark plugs.  And because her daddy’s gas station and garage was on the main drag out of town toward the park, most people would stop to fill up their tank with gas and their coolers with ice.  This resulted in a never ending flow of traffic and customers that the young girl had to attend to as well.