CHAPTER 23 JORGE—THE GARAGE
The roll gate sticks. Hasn't been raised in over two months, and the track's gone stiff with rust and disuse, and Jorge stands there fighting it alone in the morning heat until his hands ache and the metal finally screams upward on its track.
The shop's worse than he braced for. Dust thick on every surface, the Regal still up on the lift exactly where he left it, gutted and waiting for hands that never came back to finish the job.
Tools scattered where he'd dropped them the day everything went sideways.
A dead bird in the corner that's been there long enough Jorge doesn't want to know how long.
He starts with the sweeping. Feels stupid, a grown man pushing a broom through a business that used to run like something alive, but the sweeping gives his hands something to do besides sit idle and his head something to focus on besides six feet of empty cell space that isn't his problem anymore and somehow still is.
Marisol stops by that afternoon, arms crossed against a chill that isn't really there, watching him work from the doorway.
"You look tired," she says.
"Look how I feel."
"Rubén would've hated seeing it like this."
"Rubén would've hated a lot of things I've let happen since he's been gone.
" Jorge doesn't stop sweeping. Doesn't trust himself to stop and actually feel the weight of standing here without his brother for the first time in longer than he wants to admit.
"Working on it, though. Gonna get it running again. "
"Alone?"
Jorge's broom stops. "For now."
Something in his face must give it away, because Marisol doesn't push, just nods slow like she's filing the answer away for later. "You gonna tell me who put that look on your face, or am I guessing?"
"Not today."
"Fair enough." She steps in, picks up a rag, starts wiping down a workbench without being asked. "Not gonna let you do this whole thing solo either way. Rubén would've killed me."
Jorge doesn't argue. Doesn't have the energy to, and doesn't especially want to turn away the one person left who still says his brother's name like it doesn't need handling with gloves.
They work in silence a while, the good kind, dust and rust coming up under rags and brooms, the shop slowly starting to look like something that used to matter instead of something abandoned.
"You gonna finish the Regal?" Marisol asks eventually, nodding at the lift.
Jorge looks at it a long moment. Two-pump setup, half-wired, exactly the kind of build he'd been sketching out of memory on the back of commissary forms for somebody who isn't here to see it finished.
"Yeah," he says. "Gonna finish it."
"By yourself?"
"Got somebody in mind for the second set of hands." Jorge goes back to sweeping, voice careful, not ready yet to explain who or why. "Just gotta wait for him to get here."
Marisol doesn't ask more than that. Something in her face says she's decided the answer matters enough not to push too hard on tonight.
The days that follow blur into each other, more of the same—cleaning, inventory, calling old suppliers who half-remember his name, turning the lights back on one circuit at a time like he's bringing something back from the dead one small piece at a time.
It's slow, and it's lonely in a way Jorge hadn't fully prepared for, used to Rubén's voice filling the space and lately used to a different voice entirely, one he can't call and can't visit and can only hope is still counting down the same days Jorge's counting on the other side of a wall he can't see through anymore.
He writes Shawn a letter he doesn't send. Writes another. Neither one says what he actually wants it to say, and both end up in a drawer instead of an envelope, because some things Jorge's decided are better said in person or not said at all.
The Regal comes together slow, one bracket at a time, Jorge's hands remembering the work even when the rest of him feels like it's running on empty.
He finishes the switch panel late one night, tests it, watches the car respond exactly the way it's supposed to, and feels nothing like the satisfaction he expected.
Feels like half a job. Feels like he's building something for two people with only one of them standing in the room.
"Almost done," he tells the empty shop, out loud, to nobody. "Just waiting on you now."
He doesn't know if Shawn's court date has come yet.
Doesn't know what the number looks like when it finally lands.
Just knows the second bay's still empty, still waiting, exactly the way he left it, and some nights that's the only thing that gets him through locking the gate and driving home to a house that's just as empty as the shop is.