THE NEXT MORNING, WHEN she arrived at work, there was a jelly roll and a Styrofoam cup of black coffee on her desk, steam rising from the opening in the plastic lid. A gift. Keith. She could hear him talking on the phone in his adjacent office. Mano's job at the water treatment plant was easy and relentlessly boring—most days she wondered why they kept a receptionist at all. The water treatment facility was spared the public wrath of, say, the utilities department, where citizens regularly marched themselves down in person to shout about their bills. Nobody came to the water treatment office. People rarely called. She sipped the coffee while watching a few trout glide behind the glass of the tank that took up half the wall opposite her desk. Trout did better in the river's upper sections, where the water was colder, but they could be found in the river down here as well, and Lloyd insisted on having a few in the office tank. Recently, the city had cut the budget for the tank service contractor, and she and Keith had both been pretending they didn't notice how filthy things were getting in there.

One way Mano passed the time was to spend hours, on-the-clock, with her oil pastels, working to capture the rosy blush of trout gills, the way the red stripe along the side of the greenbacks faded in and out, almost woven through the deep green-brown skin, the way the rainbows kept a consistent blush that practically glowed. She'd named every rainbow trout in the tank Stevie Nicks, while the greenback cutthroats were all Lindsey Buckinghams. The tank, full of river water, was meant to display the health of the ecosystem, but it also served as an early warning. If something was killing fish in the river, it killed the fish in the tank, too.

When Mano finished her coffee, she wiped the jelly donut out of the corners of her mouth and opened the door to Keith's office, already unbuttoning her shirt. The pastels had led to the other way Mano passed the time at work, which was by fooling around with Keith. Keith disapproved of naming river trout, but he'd insisted on hanging her paintings all over the office. Mano wished she was as enthusiastic about the work as he was. She'd tried to capture their personalities, the essential beauty in their laconic gliding, but all she'd managed were trout—technically perfect, realistic, lifeless. All sight. No vision.

“They're beautiful,” Keith had said, blushing, looking at her, not the pastels, and Mano had been both touched by his awkward proposition and embarrassed by his innocent sincerity.

“Morning,” she said. Keith usually smiled with his mouth closed, self-conscious, she assumed, about the gaps in his teeth. It was endearing when he forgot himself and really let a smile rip, his teeth adorable for all their imperfections. She smiled back as she shook herself out of her blouse.