Translation: someone tried to DIY a renovation with a YouTube video and a dream.
The owner is a woman in her fifties with purple streaks in her hair and stress lines around her eyes. “Thank you for coming,” she says, wringing her hands. “Every time it happens, I lose customers. And my espresso machine. And then I lose my will to live.”
“I’m highly motivated to protect espresso,” I tell her. “Show me the patient.”
I get to work. Panel, junction boxes, tracing circuits. The rhythm is familiar and grounding. Black, white, ground. Load, line. Test, tighten, repeat.
My phone buzzes in my pocket.
For half a second, my stomach drops. I still expect every vibration to be the worst possible thing.
I wipe my hands and check.
Caleb: Made it through stats without crying in the bathroom. Grabbed an actual sandwich. Brain volume: 5.5/10.
I exhale.Thank fuck.
Miguel: Look at you feeding yourself like a person. Proud of you.
Caleb: Trying to impress this hot electrician I know.
Miguel: Tell him he has terrible taste, but I approve.
I pocket my phone and go back to the panel, the numbers on my multimeter suddenly less blurry.
“Everything okay?” the café owner asks from behind me.
“Yeah,” I say. “Just my boyfriend checking in.”
She smiles, something soft and knowing. “Is he the reason you’re humming to yourself while you work?”
I blink, realizing I am, in fact, humming along to whatever indie playlist she’s got on the speakers.
“Guilty,” I admit.
“Hold onto that,” she says. “Good love makes everything else easier to live with.”
I think about Caleb’s safety plan folded in his notebook. About his dad’s text last night. About the way he looked in the truck this morning, tired but still cracking jokes.
“Yeah,” I say quietly. “That’s the plan.”
When I clockout for the day, my shoulders ache and my hands smell like copper and dust. I swing by our parents’ house on the way home because Mom texted me a picture of a bubblingpot with the caption ‘Too much pozole. Come steal some or I’ll be offended.’
Lord knows I can’t do that.
Stepping into the kitchen always hits me in the chest. The smell, the warmth, the way she fusses over me like I’m still a lanky teenager instead of a grown man who pays taxes.
“¡Mijo!” she says, wiping her hands on a dish towel and coming in for a hug. “Mira nada más, you look tired. Are they working you like aburro?”
“Hi, Ma,” I say into her shoulder. “Love you too.”
She pulls back to squint at my face, like she can read my blood pressure in my eyeballs. “How is he?” she asks immediately.
I shrug, heading for the pot on the stove. “Hanging in there,” I say. “Midterms fried him. Spring break was… a lot. But he’s doing the work. Therapy, us finding a rhythm, the whole thing.”
Humming, she ladled pozole into a big container for me. “And you?” she asks. “Are you doing your work? Or are you only watching him like a hawk and forgetting you also have a brain?”
“I am capable of both,” I protest, leaning against the counter.
