I fix phones at the mall

Nine times out of ten it's lint. I'm serious. Lint.

Somebody comes up holding their phone out in front of them with both hands. The charging port's dead, they say, and they've already been through four cables about it. I take the hook out and go in there and pull out a plug of pocket fuzz the size of a pencil eraser. Then they've got to decide whether they're happy or embarrassed, and it's about fifty-fifty.

I charge eight for that. I'd do it free except my uncle says if you do it free then it was never broken, and he's the one who paid for the tools, so.

The counter's about four feet across. There's a stool I never use because when I sit down my knees come up level with the register, so I stand the whole shift folded over the glass. My mother has a thing she says about it every single morning and she's been saying it since I was fifteen. She looks at the top of the doorframe and then she looks at me.

I reach stuff down for strangers all day. Deb at the lotion place doesn't even ask anymore, she waves and points at the top shelf and goes back to folding. Old guy at the pretzel counter calls me the crane. I've been called worse and most of that was family. About twice a week somebody asks if I'm going to play for the Wolves and they say it like they just thought of it.

Friday I get paid and Friday my mother gets an envelope. I keep around forty, which sounds worse than it is, because forty dollars in a mall goes a long way when you know everybody who works food. The phone is also the house wifi. Hodan and Sagal do homework off it and the boys watch guys wreck dirt bikes off it.

Tuesday and Thursday I've got class before noon in a building that smells like the inside of a pool. I open at eleven thirty those days. My uncle knows and he doesn't say it, he just knows it at me from across the wing.

The guard who walks our wing at night is Yusuf. He came to me in February with a 12 where the battery was going, and not a fire or anything, but the screen was standing up off the frame maybe a millimeter on the left, which nobody ever notices until you lay something straight across it. So I told him about lithium. Then I got into heat and leaving it on the dash in July. Then I got into why the swelling always starts on the side the coil's at, which I only know because there's a guy on YouTube who cuts them open on a table. Eleven minutes. He had his hands behind his back the whole time and he let me finish.

Then it was Ramadan and everybody I know was up at two anyway and he was on nights, and that's when it turned into texting. He types like somebody's father. Full sentences with periods on the end of them. First one he sent I read about four times looking for the part where he was making fun of me.

It's nothing, is the thing. He sends me the fountain with the lights off. I send him whatever the worst phone of the day was, and last month that was a Galaxy that went through a garbage disposal, which I want to be clear is not what water damage looks like, that's a completely different repair and honestly a shorter one.

Some nights I hope he's already asleep so I don't have to answer it.

And I delete it before I go to sleep. All of it, every night. Takes maybe nine seconds.

We don't talk in the daytime, which is mostly just his schedule. There was a Saturday in August where he came through at two in the afternoon with another guard while I was selling a woman a tempered glass, and he stood there looking at my display case a good while. I looked at it too.

The kiosk is in my uncle's name. I was seventeen when we opened and they weren't going to put my name on anything. He came by last Tuesday and scrolled my tablet for about twelve minutes and then said the August number out loud and left.

Thursday the gate wouldn't drop. The track's bent an inch and a half on the left from before I ever had that space, and normally you get it by pulling down and pushing toward the wall at the same time, but it was cold and it just sat there. I was up on the chair working the slack out of it when he came around the corner.

He's not tall. He got under it and I got the left side and it came down like it had never been a problem. Then he said they don't sweep the food court until nine if I felt like sitting down.

So we sat in the dark by the closed Caribou with all the chairs up on the tables. He's got an '09 Corolla with two hundred forty thousand on it. He asked me if I'd seen the video of the kid on the escalator from October, which everybody who works here has seen about forty times. His mother wants him to take the test and go be a real cop and he doesn't want to and he hasn't told her that.

At some point I handed him my phone to show him the Galaxy and he swiped up out of the photo by accident and there was my message list. Two threads. My mother, and the guy in Brooklyn Park I get screens from.

He looked at it a second and handed it back and asked was that screen aftermarket.

I said I'm at ninety-six percent storage and something's got to go. He laughed, but not much.

Then he put his hand on the back of my neck. Maybe two seconds. Then he took it off and got up and said he had the north doors at eight thirty.

Nothing's happened.

He gave me a ride. I asked him to leave me at the Holiday on Snelling, which is four blocks short, and he didn't ask about it. He pulled in and put it in park and waited until I was across the lot.

The apartment was still awake when I got up there. Hodan had her light on because she's got something due Monday. My mother was asleep in the chair with a cooking show going and the sound off, the one where they've got twenty minutes and a basket.

I plugged the phone in and I didn't delete it.

The only cable in the house that still works right is the short one in the kitchen, so the phone sits face up on the counter next to the rice. Sagal came out for water around ten past two and moved it to get at the glasses. She put it back and stood there drinking with the fridge door open.