The morning heat came early to the garage, the kind that settled into metal and concrete before seven o’clock and stayed there all day like an unwelcome guest. Luis Alvarez arrived before anyone else, the way he always did, unlocking the side door and switching on the overhead lights one by one until the workshop filled with that particular fluorescent glow that made everything look slightly more worn than it actually was. He liked those early minutes. The quiet. The smell of oil and rubber and something faintly metallic that he had long stopped noticing except in the way a man notices something familiar and comforting without being able to name why.
He was twenty-six years old and already had the hands of someone much older. The knuckles were rough, the fingernails perpetually darkened at their edges no matter how hard he scrubbed, the palms mapped with small scars from a decade of working on engines. He didn’t mind. His father had told him once that a man’s hands should show what he’s done with his life, and Luis believed that. He believed a lot of things his father had said, even though his father had been gone for eight years now, which was perhaps exactly why he held onto those sayings so carefully.
He thought about his mother as he pulled on his work gloves. She had been awake when he left, sitting up in the narrow bed they had moved into the front room so she wouldn’t have to climb stairs. Her breathing had been steadier than the night before, which was something. The new prescription was helping, the doctor said, but it needed to be continued without interruption. Luis had done the math the previous weekend, sitting at the kitchen table with the bills spread out in front of him, and the math was not encouraging. He was managing. Just barely managing.
The other mechanics filtered in around eight. There were four of them, plus Don Ernesto himself, who arrived later and louder and filled whatever room he entered with the particular energy of a man who had never once doubted his own importance. He was not a bad mechanic, Ernesto. He had built the shop from a single bay into something respectable, and Luis understood that. But understanding someone’s accomplishments and admiring the way they carried them were different things entirely.
