I said. I was sweating, and the back of the shop smelled like extra chlorine, my mom having just recently given the pool a shock treatment. Josh leaned back in one of the folding chairs while we waited, but I couldn’t sit still, so I busied myself by filling empty tanks at the fill panel by the rental BCs at the rear wall. Attach the whip to the tank valve, step back, press the button, fill 200 psi per minute. Fifteen minutes to a full tank. Remove the whip. Repeat. “It’s going to work out,” he said, his hands laced obnoxiously behind his head. “I promise.” The hum of the compressor out back made it so that I could hear only the general rumbling of my parents’ deliberation, interrupted from time to time by Josh’s mom’s expansive actress voice. Josh’s folder of research lay open on the workbench. I could only hope it had served its purpose. We’d given our parents everything we had on the mystery of the sculpture garden but kept any mention of Cortés or the Jaguar to ourselves.
