Page 134 of One Adult, Please

Lily breaks away from the group. She walks across the plaza with small, purposeful steps. She stops in front of Grace and holds out Theodore the bear.

"He helps when you fall," Lily says solemnly.

Grace takes the bear and holds it tight.

The golden hour turns to purple. We stay on the concrete. All of us.

Eventually she'll crack a joke about the ground. But not yet.

Right now, Grace stays down.

And we stay with her.

All systems nominal.

32

ONE ADULT, PLEASE

GRACE

The bloodstain is still on the concrete.

I'm standing at the east entrance, right at the hip gate I vaulted on day one with a strawberry purse and the coordination of a drunk flamingo.

Rain hasn't washed it away. Foot traffic hasn't worn it down. It's still there if you know where to look, a faint rust-colored shadow in the concrete. A period at the end of a sentence I didn't know I was starting.

I didn't know Joel then. Or Beck. Or Grant. I didn't know about the friendship paddle, bean sharks, or the group heart situation. I definitely didn't know I'd eventually kill zombies with a stabby fork, a log flume, a roller coaster car, and a snow globe meant for my mother.

It took them four days to cross three hundred miles. Four days of catching Mom on the emergency network at scheduled checkpoints while Joel marked her progress on the where picture and recalculated the route every time a road went bad.

Now she's ten minutes out.

Joel's behind me. Beck's behind me. Grant's beside me. He broke formation. Pepper's little face pokes out of his jacket, ears swiveling toward the access road because Pepper hears everything first.

The sound of an engine drifts closer. Sunlight flashes on metal. Mrs. Patterson's ancient Subaru emerges. It rolls to a stop. The engine dies.

My mother steps out in the same blue jacket she's worn since I was in high school. The one with the sticky zipper that's survived every parent-teacher conference, every doctor visit, every Tuesday grocery run. She looks smaller. The way people get smaller when you haven't seen them in a while and the while has been the worst while.

She's holding Biscuit's carrier. The carrier is vibrating with eighteen pounds of pure Maine Coon rage. I can hear the low, continuous foghorn yowl from twenty yards away.

Mrs. Patterson climbs out the passenger side, four-foot-eleven of pure chaos wrapped in a butterfly cardigan. She's cradling Mr. Noodles, the hostile Pomeranian, in one arm and a foil-covered casserole dish in the other.

My mother spots me. Her face does the mother thing: every emotion at once, none of them winning. Relief. Anger. Love. Fear. Joy. The fury of a woman who's done worrying and now has to feel everything that worrying was holding back.

She walks toward the hip gate.

I reach for Grant's hand. My other fist twists in my hoodie.

She stops and reads Joel's sign.

WELCOME TO WONDERSPHERE. PLEASE ENTER THROUGH THE HIP GATE. MANAGEMENT ISN'T RESPONSIBLE FOR GOAT-RELATED INCIDENTS.

"One adult, please," she says.

I'm crying. I'm laughing. I'm doing both and they're the same thing, and my hoodie has fresh tears on it, brand new tears, inaugural tears, the new hoodie's first baptism.

Joel opens the gate.