Page 121 of One Adult, Please

Her hand finds mine. Small. Glitter-covered.

Kevin's on the churro cart. Kevin watches the new people in the waiting garden with the evaluative gaze of a goat who's just acquired fourteen additional targets for unsanctioned headbutting and is experiencing something that, in a less complicated animal, I'd call joy.

Grace squeezes my hand once. Then lets go. Then walks back toward the waiting garden, glitter trailing behind her like a comet's tail, and I watch her go.

The golden hour deepens. The park settles into something new, something bigger than four people that started when a woman with a strawberry purse jumped a turnstile and decided to stay.

29

CALL MOM

GRACE

The comms console has a beige plastic handset and a coiled cord. The kind of phone that lives in government buildings, dentist offices, and places where aesthetics go to die.

Joel's been working the relay for twenty minutes by the time he nods and hands me the handset. "The emergency network relayed us as far as Brookside. The shelter answered. They're bringing her to their radio."

My lungs forget their job. I take the handset. My hands are shaking.

Joel returns to the door. Other people bring flowers. Joel brings structural positioning.

Beck's against the wall, to my left. Underneath the chaos grin and the too-good-a-time energy is a man who knows exactly what it costs to reach for someone who might not be there.

Grant's in the corner. Pepper's in his jacket. Captain's on the filing cabinet, glaring at the fluorescent lights.

I hold the handset to my ear.

Static. The same static as before, the cotton-and-distance sound, the sound of the world being too big and the signal being too small.

"Mom?" I say.

Static.

"Mom, it's Grace. I'm at WonderSphere. The theme park. On Route 9. If you can hear me, it's Grace."

Static that goes on long enough for my brain to open every bad tab, every terrible possibility, every version of this where the other end is empty and the casserole is cold and Mrs. Patterson's little dog is alone and Biscuit is...

"Grace?"

My body makes the executive decision that standing is no longer a service it provides. I sit down on the comms room floor with the handset pressed against my ear, my back against the console, my knees against my chest, and the sound of my mother's voice filling up every room in my body, even the storage closets.

"Mom."

"Grace Elizabeth, are you alright?"

She's using my middle name. Which means she's alive and she's fully operational, all systems running, the most reliable machine in the universe. My mother.

"I'm alright. I'm at the theme park. We have walls and food and water and a whole system. The system is in crayon. It's a long story."

"Did you use the coupon?" she asks.

The coupon.

I'm laughing. I'm crying. The two things are happening simultaneously and I can't tell which one started first and it doesn't matter because they're the same thing. They've always been the same thing. The comedy and the crying are just two doors into the same room.

"I didn't use the coupon, Mom."

"That was a good coupon, Grace."