“What are you looking at?”

She kept staring.

“Stop reading my nametag,” he said.

“I can’t read,” she said. “I’m four.”

“Oh,” he replied.

“I want the Paw Patrol cup,” she said, still staring up at him but then looking away to the sippy cup on the table display behind him.

“It’s 5 dollars,” he said. “You have to ask your mom or your nanny if you can get one.”

She scampered off strangely in her sparkling red shoes to find someone who could take the next steps. He felt weird talking to a kid about money and wondered if she even knew what 5 dollars meant. 

She didn’t end up coming back over.

He parked strollers. Rearranged them. Tuning into the various types of stroller brakes which locked the wheels, pushing down on the red button or pulling something up with his toe so the wheels could move freely.

He opened the door. Opened it. Then opened it again. Pushed it closed. Then opened it. Told people to come through, to make room, to have a good weekend, to stay warm. 

He swept crumbs. Crushed cheerios. Leaves that blew in from outside or came in on stroller wheels. He wiped up sticky bits of fruit leather adhered to the floor. Squashed peas. Exploded blueberries. Shimmery outlines of spilled juice or milk or water. Vomit. 

Someone said it was too cold. He got the stepladder and opened the stepladder and climbed up to switch the heat on. He closed the stepladder and leaned it in an open space. He opened the door and stood in the doorway for some air. 

Across the street, guys were valet parking. It was a big parking lot and there was even a big elevator called the shaftway for cars to be taken up and parked on higher floors. Celebrities lived on this block. Kids liked to look through the windows at the cars. The guys stood around during down time. 

He opened the door. A stroller was coming in pushed by a lady with gray neat hair, who came in swiftly and pointed a finger sharply at him and said, “You.”

“You need to come here and look at my stroller,” she said. “The wheels won’t turn.”

She maneuvered the stroller with effort, struggling against its stubborn straight path.

“Ok,” he said.

She got it in a good spot then slid her sleek jacked off and whisked her grandson out of his cocoon and upstairs into the movement class for babies who so far can only crawl. He forgot about her wheels.

More strollers coming in and going out. More wrapped up diapers and banana peels and entire bags of pretzel sticks in the garbage. The garbage got full. The broom got tedious so he had to get the vacuum. The vacuum had to be emptied so he emptied the clumps of dust and hair into the full garbage bag and the dust sprayed on his shirt. He wiped some dust off and reassembled the vacuum cleaner and left it standing against the wall while he took the garbage bag out and tied it up. He opened the door and walked out a few steps and swung the bag into the big garbage can outside meant for their trash. People walked by.

He went back in. A child eating cut up bits of avocado in a high chair reached behind him and turned off one of the lights and turned on the fans that were attached to the ceiling. They spun wildly and bat two loose balloons around on the ceiling like pinballs. Everyone gasped and looked up at the sound, which was loud and startling. A baby cried and someone shhh’d. Everyone got quiet while he walked across the room to switch off the fan and on the light and restore order.

More strollers coming in and out. He realigned the rows of them to fill in the gaps and make room where there wasn’t any. It had been an hour and the lady with the broken wheels came back and said, “Did you look at my wheels?”

“No, I didn’t get a chance,” he said.

“Well, can you look at them now? I have to get home!” she said, exasperated.

So he went over and saw that the stroller’s front wheels had locked and wouldn’t swivel. He half pushed and half carried the stroller over to the couches, and she sat down in one, holding her small grandson on her lap. He bent down to look.

“Thank you so much for taking a look,” she said.” I was asking people up there if they had this stroller or ever had this problem before, but…”

“No problem,” he said, face close to the front of the stroller. He felt a latch behind the front wheels which released the lock, the mechanism was purely manual, and the wheels would only revert to their state of refusing to swivel. He searched for a way to keep them from locking again.

On the couch, she held the nozzle of a green applesauce pouch to the mouth of her grandson, which he sucked absentmindedly while looking around. 

“I’m going to look for an instruction manual,” he said, standing up and pulling out his phone. His fingertips were covered in grease. 

Peg-Perego YPSI. U.S.A/CANADA. 9. Fixed or swiveling front wheels. He opened a .pdf with lots of numbered diagrams about each part of the stroller, which he hoped was the same model and type as the one in front of him so he could get this over with. 

He knelt down again to the floor with his phone in one hand and the other feeling around the bottom and sides of the stroller, looking for the answer. Then the child in the highchair pressed the button again, that one which turned all the fans on, and they came on in full force, the rigorous spinning only growing in intensity, causing one of the ceiling tiles to rattle and begin to slip from its fixtures, coming slightly loose. Then coming completely loose, as the edges of the tile crumbled away and it fell in flat certainty towards the floor, crashing over his head and his bent back while he was trying to fix the wheel, and he died.