Page 53 of One Adult, Please

14

KEVIN IS ON PROBATION

GRACE

The wildlife rescue center is clean, which shouldn't surprise me but does because the rest of the garden part has gone feral and this building is a pocket of maintained order in the middle of the chaos. The floors are swept. The animal enclosures are organized. The medical supply cabinets are labeled with handwritten tags in precise, small lettering. A handwritten feeding schedule is posted on the wall, with days of entries in the same neat script, and every feeding time is logged.

Grant opens his jacket slightly so we can see the wallaby properly. She's small, gray-brown, with enormous ears that swivel independently like satellite dishes scanning for threats. She looks at me like she's been on Earth for seven months and is already tired of it. "She eats every four hours. Specialized marsupial formula."

He leads us to the main enclosure room. It's large, open, divided into sections with portable fencing and enrichment structures. And inside it are the rest of Grant's charges.

Grant checks the rear holding yard, unlocks the enclosure door, and lets the two round friends inside. They waddle through, settle near the water trough, and resume their life's work of being round. He locks the door behind them.

"Those are the round friends," I tell Grant.

"They are Fernando and Diego," Grant says. "They're brothers. They were part of the ambassador animal program."

In the far enclosure, on a perch, sits a red-tailed hawk with one working eye. The left eye is clouded, sealed, scarred over from something that happened before the apocalypse and has nothing to do with the current situation. The right eye is golden and sharp and focused on me with intensity that suggests it evaluated my threat level and found it both negligible and entertaining.

"That's Captain," Grant says. "He was brought in six months ago with a wing injury. He's non-releasable due to the eye. He's... he has a temperament."

"He's an angry pirate bird," I say.

"He's not angry. He's cautious."

Captain, as if to prove a point, lets out a scream that sounds like a velociraptor who's been challenged. The scream echoes through the rescue center. The round friends don't react. Pepper buries deeper into Grant's jacket. Beck takes a step back. Joel doesn't move.

"He's cautious," Grant repeats, in the tone of a parent defending a difficult child at a school conference.

"He's an angry pirate bird and I love him. He's perfect."

In the last enclosure, on a bed of straw and shredded newspaper, is a tortoise.

He's the kind of old that you can see in the rings of his shell and the slow way he turns his head to look at us, taking approximately four full seconds to complete the rotation, as if time is a concept he's heard about but has chosen not to participate in. His shell is the size of a laundry basket. His eyes are ancient and wet and deeply unbothered.

"That's Cornelius," Grant says. "He's an African spurred tortoise. He's approximately eighty years old. He's been at WonderSphere since the park opened."

"He's eighty?"

"Approximately. They can live to over a hundred."

"He's lived through everything. He's lived through... wars and presidents and the moon landing and disco and the internet and now this and look at him. He's the most unbothered creature in this building."

Cornelius blinks at me.

"Cornelius is my emotional support tortoise," I announce. "I'm claiming him. Cornelius and I have bonded. Look at his face. He gets me."

Grant's watching me interact with his animals and his face is a window. Everything he feels moves across his features like weather across a sky, visible, readable, uncontrolled. Right now the weather is confused, touched, overwhelmed, and cautiously hopeful, which is a lot of weather for one sky but Grant seems to have the capacity.

"We should talk about the plan," Joel says, and I can tell he's been waiting to say this for approximately ten minutes.

"The crayon plan!" I pull the brochure from my pocket and unfold it on Grant's exam table.

Grant reads the list. I watch his eyes move from item to item and I watch his face do its weather thing as he encounters each one. "Churros... if available," he reads.

"Morale item."

"Document all Joel jokes... for the record."