Page 75 of One Adult, Please

“Can we have one moment before you tell me the aquarium is going to die?”

"We did a good thing," Joel says.

"Thank you."

“The power is still a problem.”

"I know, Joel."

Beck laughs. Grant smiles into his chili. Captain, on a chair back, ruffles his feathers and settles.

I pull the crayon plan toward me. I need to add the power problem because Joel is right. Joel is always right about infrastructure, and I need to account for it on the plan because the crayon plan accounts for everything.

I pick up the periwinkle. I start writing. Item sixteen: FIX THE POWER MACHINE THING (Joel knows what I mean). Item seventeen: CELEBRATE (mandatory). Item eighteen: KEVIN CONTAINMENT STRATEGY. Item nineteen: SLEEP.

Sleep. That's the one that's been whispering since this morning. Since before this morning. Since the day I jumped the hip gate and walked into a park that didn't want me and decided to keep it.

The crayon moves slower. The letters get bigger. My hand is heavy. The restaurant is warm.

Joel is talking about power and something about the aquarium's secondary pump system, and the sound of it is so steady, so even, so predictably Joel that it becomes a rhythm, a pattern, a hum.

My eyes are doing the thing. The funnel cake sugar crash combined with a full day of clearing buildings and fighting wrong people and managing Kevin.

My body says: there's a shoulder next to you and you're tired and the shoulder is warm.

Joel's shoulder is right there and my head finds it the way my head found the poncho pillow on the bench, the way everything I do happens accidentally, completely, and without the intermediate step of thinking about it first.

I lean into him. My head touches his shoulder. His shirt is soft against my cheek.

He stops talking mid-word.

My eyes close.

The last thing I feel before I go is the breathing of a man who's choosing very carefully not to move or do anything that might disturb the head on his shoulder, and I think: oh. Oh, I should probably not be doing this. I should probably sit up and apologize and blame the peaches and the exhaustion and the sugar crash.

But I don't. And Joel doesn't move.

The warm dark takes me down gently, and the ground doesn't reach for me.

19

THE FOOD ROOM CONFESSIONAL

JOEL

Ican't sleep. Before all this I couldn't sleep most nights. I'd lie in my apartment and stare at the ceiling and think about pressure gauges. Pump schedules. The slow, predictable decay of infrastructure that nobody notices until it fails.

I was good at not sleeping. I had a system.

The system doesn't work anymore. Because the apocalypse gave me something I actually want to be awake for.

Beck is asleep in the booth by the kitchen. Sprawled across the vinyl seat with one arm hanging off the edge and his mouth slightly open. Grant is two booths down, curled on his side facing Pepper’s insulated pouch. He fed her at midnight and fell asleep with one hand beside the pouch. Captain's perched on the booth back above him like a one-eyed gargoyle standing watch.

Grace's booth is empty.

I sit up. The emergency lights cast everything in dim orange. The windows are dark. The plaza beyond them is darker.

I find her at the counter.