Page 13 of One Adult, Please

"What do you have?" I ask.

He holds up the crescent wrench. "This."

"That's it? No snacks?"

"I have a few protein bars. More in the mechanical room."

"What kind of protein bars?" I ask, because priorities.

"The kind that taste like compressed sawdust with a chocolate coating that's lying about being chocolate."

"So the bad kind."

"There's a good kind?"

"Joel. There are so many good kinds. There are ones with caramel and ones with peanut butter and ones that are basically candy bars pretending to be healthy and those are the best ones because they've committed to the lie and I respect that."

He sits down on the bench across from me. From here, he smells like machine oil, clean sweat, and something that's probably just soap but my brain has labeled it 'Joel.'

A shark passes overhead, close enough that I see the individual pores on its skin, and I flinch so hard I almost drop the stabby fork.

"They can't get through," Joel says.

The shark loops back around. It's very big. It has the kind of face that says "I've never worried about anything in my life and I don't intend to start now." I want the emotional stability of a sand tiger shark in a controlled environment.

"How long have you worked here?" I ask, because I fill silence the way some people fill swimming pools. Aggressively and with no plan for drainage.

"Three years."

"Do you like it?"

"I already told you no."

"Right, but people are sometimes dramatic when they first meet someone. Like a defense mechanism. You say you hate your job but really you just had a bad day and normally it's fine."

"It's not fine. It's a theme park. I fix things that break and everything breaks constantly because sixty thousand people touch everything and children are essentially a destructive force of nature in light-up sneakers."

"So you fix things. What kind of things?"

"Plumbing. Electrical. HVAC. Pump systems. Ride maintenance when the ride team is short. Generator management. Water treatment for the marine exhibits." He lists them the way someone else might list groceries.

A man listing mechanical skills in a blue-lit tunnel while holding a crescent wrench should not be doing anything to my internal organs, and yet here I am, in the fish tube, one HVAC away from making choices my mother would want me to hydrate through.

"So you keep the whole building alive."

He looks at me like I accidentally said the right thing and he wasn't prepared for me to be capable of that.

"I keep the systems running," he says. "The building does the rest."

"You know that's the same thing, right? Without you the systems stop and the building is just... walls with nothing inside."

He looks at the tank. A school of little silver fish flickers past.

I open the dolphin shortbread and offer him one. He looks at it like I've offered him a small ceramic dog.

"It's a cookie," I say. "Shaped like a dolphin. It's not complicated."

He takes one. His fingers brush mine when he takes it and I feel that in my whole arm, which is a disproportionate response to a cookie handoff and my nervous system needs to get a grip.