May gathered the empty buckets and watched Sabrina clock her departure from her perch above the wall. Some of the cutest animals were dumb fucks—koalas whose baseline was high as a kite, dachshunds who fawned over you after mere moments apart, like you were the prodigal son returned as a salt lick—but May felt positively indicted by the elephants. Where do you think you're going with that shitty attitude? Must be nice, coming and going freely.
"Jesus, okay, I'll try harder," May said to the elephant, loud enough for a family on the observation deck to raise their heads in her direction.
May had had an unconventional path here to this zoo, an hour north of Baltimore. Two back-to-back engineering degrees she'd hardly used and night school for the two-year degree in veterinary assistance. Ten years in a series of improvised jobs—dog walking, pet grooming, a brief stint at the local vet's office—proving to her that she would be okay, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other okay, as long as she worked with animals.
She sometimes thought about continuing on to get her DVM, but she was already thirty-three. When she'd heard about the keeper opening, she'd jumped at the chance. Setting aside the question of whether it was right to hold animals in an environment where they couldn't run at a sprint (it clearly wasn't), zoo-keeper jobs were highly coveted. Once you got in, it was almost impossible to be fired and, in time, she'd have enough saved to finally move out of her mother's house in Aberdeen.
No one, not her mom or her ultra-successful siblings or even May's younger self had ever pictured her winding up here. The mental vision board she'd created for herself in college had looked like this: a backpack and a passport with all the pages stamped, her passable French and Spanish and Rosetta Stone for everything else, flings that lasted as long as it took to bring water to the village, changing the world. When the stupidity of that vision became cringingly clear, she'd had no clue how to make another plan for herself that she could trust. How did other people do it? Could anyone explain it to her, anyone she wasn't related to, that is, anyone who wasn't still marching toward their destiny (the law, soccer, good teeth) like it would save them? Sometimes the irony of her situation—that ten years later, she was still in her hometown, boxed in like her dad was before he accepted the job in Iraq—was too fucking much.
It took an hour, all told, to get to the bottom of what was ailing Scout, and May was permitted to help hold the calf's foot while Kristen razored down the pits on the sole and filed the cracked and infected distal toenail. Afterward, she went into the park to sneak a cigarette under the umbrella of a fig tree that mostly hid the staff door from the public restrooms. How was it possible, she wondered, for an elephant's foot to smell so very bad and a lion's mane to smell so very good? There was a small breeze and she turned her back to it to get a light, praying the nicotine would chase away the stench she still carried on her fingertips.
"May?" someone behind her called.
Fuck, she thought. If that was Keith, it'd be weeks before he'd let her near the animals again. Regulations, he'd say. A question of judgment. It was always one step forward, two steps back with him.
But it wasn't Keith. It was... "Will?"
May dropped her smoke and stepped on it. Will fucking Mackenzie. He was laughing, after all these years and the way she'd left things between them. Their basic dispositions hadn't changed: Will still tended toward delight, and she still hated surprises. She was down to just one precious smoke a day—and now it was smushed under her shoe.
"I said to myself, there's no way that's Mayhem, wearing a uniform. But smoking by the bathroom? That's on brand."
May blushed, not because nobody called her that anymore, but because the May Barber Will had known would have had to be dragged here by the tattered edges of her oversized army jacket. She would've looked around, her eyes ringed in black and hidden behind hair she'd mussed to gritty perfection with dry shampoo, and she would've seen a prison. She wouldn't have believed she could ever be this wholesome, cosplaying as a big-game hunter in a goddamn pith helmet.
"Who's this?" she asked to put the attention back on Will. After all, he had more to explain than she did, specifically the little girl holding his hand. She couldn't have been more than three years old, his spitting image.
"This is my daughter, Zoe."
Of course Will was a dad. Not a shock, only an eventuality. "Hi, Zoe," May said.
"Can you say hi?" Will asked, but Zoe wrapped herself around her father's leg. "We practiced this but it looks like we're a little shy today."
Practiced?
"Were you waiting for me?" she asked, and she knew by the way Will avoided her eyes (like father, like daughter) that he had been.
Will cleared his throat (more proof) and said, "Were you talking to the elephants? We thought we heard you."
So they were the family that had been standing on the observation deck. Now it was May's turn to be embarrassed.
