Page 76 of One Adult, Please

She's sitting on one of the high stools, bare feet hooked on the rung. Her hair is down, which I've never seen before, and it changes the shape of her face. She's eating mozzarella sticks. Cold ones from the batch we made for dinner, left on the counter in a paper boat because none of us had the energy to put them away.

I sit on the stool next to her. She pushes the paper boat toward me without looking up.

"They're better hot," she says.

"Most food is."

"Not ice cream."

"That's not food. That's frozen dairy."

"Frozen dairy is a food, Joel. It's in the food pyramid."

"The food pyramid was discontinued in 2011. It's a plate now."

She looks at me. The emergency light turns her eyes into something between amber and copper. "You know the food pyramid was discontinued?"

"I read."

"You read about the food pyramid."

"I read about nutrition guidelines. The pyramid had structural issues. Too much emphasis on grains."

She stares at me for three full seconds. Then she picks up a mozzarella stick and bites it in half, chewing while maintaining eye contact with an intensity that I think is supposed to be challenging but mostly just makes me aware of her mouth.

"Why are you awake?" she asks.

"Couldn't sleep."

"That's not an answer. That's a description of the problem."

"Why are you awake?"

"I asked first."

I take a mozzarella stick. It's room temperature and slightly rubbery, the cheese inside congealed into something that resists biting. I eat it anyway.

"Before," I say. The word comes out before I decide to say it. "Before all this. I used to lie awake and think about pump schedules."

"Pump schedules."

"Pressure gauges. Filtration rates. The rate of decay in mechanical systems. Predictable things. Things I could calculate."

"That sounds..."

"Boring."

"I was going to say calming. But also boring. Both."

I almost smile. I feel it start, the pull at the corner of my mouth, and I stop it before it gets anywhere. "I worked here for three years. I knew every system in this park. I could tell you the PSI in the fountain pumps without checking. I could tell you which ride was going to break down next week based on the sound the motor made."

"That's impressive."

"It's not. It's just paying attention. That's all I did. I paid attention to machines because machines made sense. They broke in predictable ways. They failed according to physics. You could see it coming if you watched closely enough."

Grace is quiet. Outside, the wind moves through the empty plaza, and I hear the distant sound of something I choose to believe is a trash can and not anything else.

"My last employee evaluation," I say, and I don't know why I'm saying this, except that it's 2 a.m. and something about this moment feels like a confessional booth without the religion, "said I was adequate. That was the word. Adequate. Joel demonstrates adequate performance in all assigned duties. No areas of concern. No areas of exceptional achievement. Adequate."