"We are older," Eddie mumbles.

"What are you, the manager?" Noel says.

Eddie shrugs. The morning is already hot and thick with humidity. This is their routine: breakfast, once a week, Saturday mornings, before the park gets crazy. Noel works in the dry cleaning business. Eddie helped him get the contract for Ruby Pier's maintenance uniforms.

Noel, chewing a mouthful of sausage, slides out from the booth, leans across another table, and grabs a salt shaker.

"You see any salt?" Eddie asks Noel.

"No foolin'?" Noel says. He lifts an eyebrow. "I thought you had to be older to be president."

Eddie shakes it hard. "How tough is it to keep salt on the table?"

He is 37. His breakfast is getting cold.

"Here," he mumbles. "Happy birthday."

Eddie shrugs. "He's about our age."

Noel closes the magazine. His voice drops. "Hey. You hear what happened at Brighton?"

"What'dya think of this good-lookin' guy?" Noel says. He has a copy of Life magazine open to a photo of a young political candidate. "How can this guy run for president? He's a kid!"

Eddie puts his tongue between his teeth. Every now and then he hears these stories, an accident at a park somewhere, and he shudders as if a wasp just flew by his ear. Not a day passes that he doesn't worry about it happening here, at Ruby Pier, under his watch.

"You know anybody up there?" Noel asks.

"Nuh-uh," he says. "I don't know no one in Brighton."

Eddie nods. He sips his coffee. He'd heard. An amusement park. A gondola ride. Something snapped. A mother and her son fell 60 feet to their death.

An old man walks past in a panama hat, smoking a cigar.

He fixes his eyes out the window, as a crowd of beachgoers emerges from the train station. They carry towels, umbrellas, wicker baskets with sandwiches wrapped in paper. Some even have the newest thing: foldable chairs, made from lightweight aluminum.

"Lookit that guy," Eddie says. "I promise you, he'll drop that cigar on the boardwalk."

"Yeah?" Noel says. "So?"

"It falls in the cracks, then it starts to burn. You can smell it. The chemical they put on the wood. It starts smoking right away. Yesterday I grabbed a kid, couldn't have been more than four years old, about to put a cigar butt in his mouth."

Noel lifts an eyebrow. "We can make the track by six."

Eddie pokes a fork at his eggs, now too cold to bother with.

Noel makes a face. "And?"

"All right," he says.

Eddie turns aside. "And nothing. People should be more careful, that's all."

"What time you finish today?" Noel asks.

Eddie doesn't answer. The old darkness has taken a seat alongside him. He is used to it by now, making room for it the way you make room for a commuter on a crowded bus.

He thinks about the maintenance load today. Broken mirror in the Fun House. New fenders for the bumper cars. Glue, he reminds himself, gotta order more glue. He thinks about those poor people in Brighton. He wonders who's in charge up there.

"Come on. It's your birthday," Noel says.

Noel shovels a forkful of sausage into his mouth. "You're a barrel of laughs. You always this much fun on your birthday?"

Eddie thinks about Marguerite. He always thinks about Marguerite when Noel mentions the horse track.

Eddie exhales. "It's gonna be busy. Summer. Saturday. You know."