He taught me to drive my mother's car

There's four minutes of hot water in that apartment and my brothers use all of it. I told my mother. I told her like four times, the boiler needs somebody to look at it, and she says call the landlord, and the landlord says he's sending somebody out. Nobody's coming. So Tuesday I'm taking a cold shower at six in the morning, and then I go in and a guy shows up nine minutes late for a two o'clock and asks me if I can still do the beard.

I did the beard. I always do it. I'm just saying nine minutes is nine minutes.

They call me Chiqui in the shop. All of them, every day, since my first week. Freddy's got a stomach he can rest his phone on, but sure, let's talk about my height. I'm in the back chair by the bathroom, which is the chair you get in your second year, and I pay two twenty-five a week for it whether anybody sits in it or not. My book's fine. I post my fades and people come, thirty-one hundred followers, mostly Lawrence and Methuen.

Anyway. Ruben.

He's my mother's boyfriend. Two years in April. He's not my stepfather or nothing, they're not married. He's thirty-nine and he does HVAC. He's got the van with the ladders on it.

So November her Corolla starts grinding, metal on metal, and she's still driving it to work because she works six days and there's no other car. He tells her don't drive it. Then Saturday he shows up with pads and rotors he got off a guy in Methuen who sells parts out of his yard, and that's the same guy my cousin bought a transmission off, wrong transmission, wouldn't take it back, and my cousin is still bringing it up at cookouts three years later. Anyway. Ruben did the brakes himself in the lot behind our building. I held the light for him. Two hours in the cold, and he's got his hands in there explaining to me what a caliper is like I asked him.

When he's done he stands up and wipes his hands on his jeans and goes, you drive?

I'm twenty-two and I didn't have a license. There's reasons for that. My mother had the only car and she's gone six days a week, and by the time I was old enough nobody had a hundred hours to sit in a passenger seat with me.

He said Sunday. The shop doesn't open till twelve on Sunday so I couldn't even say I had work.

First Sunday he's downstairs at seven with two large iced coffees, extra extra. No, that's wrong, the first one he caught a call and came at nine and we only did twenty minutes. Seven with the coffees was every Sunday after. In November. He drinks it iced in February too, I've seen him do it.

We went to the big lot behind the Wood Mill, down by the canal. Nobody's in there Sunday morning except seagulls and a shopping cart nobody's moved. He took two orange buckets out of the van and walked them out and set them down and said, that's the car in front of you and that's the car behind you, don't hit either one.

I hit both. For a month I hit at least one of them every single week.

One Sunday in December I clipped the back one three times in a row and I got out and kicked it across the lot. Just kicked it, like a kid. And he didn't laugh. He walked over and got it and carried it back and put it where it was and got in the passenger seat and sat there. So I got in. We did it eleven more times. The eleventh one I put it in there clean and he said there you go, and that was all he said.

He's six two. He'd have to run the seat all the way back when he got in, and I'd run it up again after, and that went five months and he never once made a joke out of it. My own brother makes that joke.

He never called me Chiqui either. He'd just say Elvin.

He plays típico in the car. The old stuff with the accordion that my grandmother used to have on in the morning. I'd turn it down when I was trying to concentrate and he'd turn it right back up. I've got two of those songs on my phone now. I don't even like them.

I been telling him to come to the shop and let me cut him. He's been going to a guy on Park Street for years and that guy leaves his line crooked on the left side, and I told him that, and he'd go yeah yeah yeah.

March I took the test up in Haverhill because everybody says Lawrence fails you on purpose. Tuesday morning. I took the day off, which is money I don't get back. He drove me up in the Corolla and then sat in that lot the whole forty minutes. Didn't go get coffee, didn't go nowhere. Parallel park was the part I wasn't even worried about by then.

I passed. I got back in the car and he shook my hand, like an actual handshake, and then we got chimis off the truck by the park and he went to work at eleven.

And that was it, which is normal.

There's a noise in the front end, though. A click when you turn left. I told him about it in April and he took it around the block with his window down and said he didn't hear anything. I told him again in May. I told my mother to tell him. It's a click. I'm not making up a click.

My mother put music on in the kitchen in July. She hasn't done that since 2018. She got her nails done twice this summer and she's on the phone with my aunt laughing at eleven at night.

He put four hundred in on the rent in June and then again in July, I seen the envelope on the counter. My room's the one off the kitchen. It used to be where the table went. She hung the door herself with hinges from Home Depot and it still doesn't close all the way.

Wednesday he came in. Into the shop, I mean, for a cut.

Two thirty on a Wednesday, dead, Freddy asleep in his own chair with the phone on his stomach. Ruben walks in with his work shirt on and points at my chair and sits down. I put the cape on him. Low taper. Then I did his beard and went after that crooked line on the left. It's not really fixed. You'd have to grow the whole side out for that. He didn't say nothing about it.

He doesn't talk when he's getting cut. Some guys talk the entire twenty minutes. He just sat there with his eyes half shut and let me move his head where I needed it to go.

When I turned him around to the mirror he said, that's clean. Then he went and paid Freddy at the front because he didn't know you pay the barber, so I had to go up and get it off Freddy. He tipped me twenty on a thirty dollar cut.

He said tell your mother six o'clock.