We take one car to Sunday dinner

Babcock's one-way going up and the permit signs start at the corner. If you come at it off Park you've got to go around by Hungerford and come back down, and on top of that the church lets out at twelve thirty. After one o'clock there's nothing on that street. You'd be circling.

So it's one car. Two cars for eleven blocks and then both of us out there hunting a spot. It's nothing.

His bakery's on Park by the check cashing place. That was a Rite Aid before. No, it was a Brooks, then the Rite Aid. I pull up around twelve forty and the gate's already down and he's standing out front with a box under his arm. Pan sobao. Quesitos if Yesenia's coming, and she comes most weeks now that her hours at the hospital settled down. There's a dog in the second floor next door that starts up every time that gate comes down.

I'm at the depot on Locust. Twenty-two years. I do the wheelchair lifts mostly, the Braun units, and I'll take brakes when we're short-handed. There was a guy did the lifts before me, Ruddy, and he would, anyway. Right knee's finished. Thirty years kneeling on concrete.

At Carmen's I pick my chair before anybody sits. The wooden one by the doorway. The good one by the window is soft and it takes me two tries to get out of it and the room goes quiet while I do it.

Marisol and me were done in 2013. Sixteen years married. Her mother still does Sunday, one o'clock, pernil, and she does the beans with the ham hock in them. She pulls the meat off the bone with her fingers standing up at the stove before any of it gets to the table. Ochenta y tres años, bendita, her sugar's no good and she's still in there frying. I still show up.

Nestor's her brother. Older than me. His wife Ana got sick the winter of '15 and he stopped coming for about a month, just didn't come, and Carmen kept saying out loud that somebody ought to go by there. So I went by there. He came down and got in the car. Ana passed the following June.

He's got burns up the inside of both wrists from the ovens, old ones, and there's flour down in his watchband. My car smells like the bakery until about Tuesday.

We don't talk much on the way over. He'll tell me the flour went up again, or what the guy from the distributor tried to pull on him, que se cree que uno nació ayer. I'll tell him about the buses. It's eleven blocks. There's not time for a whole lot.

Yesenia got engaged in June. Danny. He's alright. He does HVAC out of a shop in Newington and he calls me Mr. Ortiz, which I've told him twice not to do.

So now there's a legal pad on the table after we eat. Marisol brings it. The wedding's the middle of next June at the place on Prospect with the tent out back, and Carmen wants the seating settled this year on account of her health, which she also says out loud. That's how she does things.

Danny's people take one whole side. Then it's our side, and that took forty minutes with Titi Hilda sitting in on it. Esa mujer sits in on everything.

Hilda asked where Tío Nestor was going.

Marisol didn't look up off the pad. She said put him with Rafa, they come together anyway. Then she asked Yesenia about the deposit on the band.

Nestor had his glass in his hand and he set it down on the plastic.

I said the lift on 38 is going to fail its inspection in November. Then I got into the sensor on 41, the one that's been throwing a code since August, and the part's on back order out of Charlotte, and I explained the difference between back order and discontinued because people mix those two up all the time. I said if the district doesn't cut the purchase order by October they'll be pulling buses off routes right when the weather turns. Danny asked me a question about it and I answered that too.

Here's the other thing. Yesenia had me down at six with Danny's uncles. Not on purpose. That's just where the ex-husband goes. She crossed it out and wrote me up with the family, and then she looked over at me to make sure I'd seen her do it.

Carmen's 83. When she goes it's Marisol's house, and Marisol's got Wilson now.

Carmen made me a plate to take with me, same as always. Foil over the top, and a paper towel up under the foil so it doesn't sweat. She hands it to me at the door and pats my arm.

We took Broad going back because of the church. He had the empty box on his lap. He keeps the boxes. There's a stack of them in the back of the shop by the mixer.

He said, she's not wrong.

I told him about the tire. The right front's got a slow leak and I've been putting air in it at the Shell instead of dealing with it, and I told him what the shop on Maple wants for a plug and what it turns into if the belt's gone and they've got to do the whole tire. I told him what the two brands run. He listened to all of it.

Some Sundays I don't go home after. The stairs to his place are on the outside of the building off the alley, and I leave the car on Park where the meters quit at six.

I sit out front till the light goes on upstairs. That's left over from when the street was worse.

Then I go home. The box slides around back there and the grease comes through the cardboard when the bread's still warm.

Right front was at twenty-six the last time I put the gauge on it. It wants thirty-five. The air machine at the Shell is around the side by the dumpster and it eats quarters.