Time Off

Chapter Two

Severino gazed at his mother caringly. She was sleeping, exhausted as usual. He was terrified and excited at the same time. What has happened to Mama? he wondered. She had always been listless and melancholy, a moderately fulfilled mother that struggled through an early divorce and was left saddled with the responsibility for raising a son and a daughter. By circumstance, she was stuck in the gravity of Silicon Valley, a gravity that left you afloat while its forces sucked from your pockets, every dollar you struggled to earn. Angelica knew not how to escape. She felt trapped but somehow powerless to move from under the weight of her responsibilities. She often wondered why she hadn't moved to Tucson, near her sister, where she could better afford a life for herself and her kids. But that was a long time ago. She had made her decision. It would not be about her, it was all about Sevy and little Lolita.

When she first rented half of a dilapidated mobile home in Buena Vista mobile home park, shared by another mother and child who had been also ditched by some cabrón, Angelica was working as a night janitor with her cousins. They were lucky enough to work at two elementary schools close by. But it didn't pay enough to get her own place. She had to endure other people's problems in close quarters while looking after her own. But she came to regard herself as lucky. Over time she learned that her kids were attending schools in the best district in the state and from that point on, her sole mission was to stay put, no matter what she had to endure. 

Then one day her cousin Miguelito, who was her lifeline and kept her working, got a good job at Stanford in the facilities department. At Stanford they liked him and soon were calling him Mikey. He got Angel a job too. She doubled her income and now carried around a university badge with great pride. The mobile home was still on its last legs but she managed to buy it and settle into a hard but stable life focused only on her kids.

Her job entailed administrative tasks related to facilities projects and ongoing maintenance. Her desk was in an unattractive building in the middle of the facilities complex at the edge of campus. But most of her time was spent out in the field, with contractors going through lists of changes and corrections noted by the engineers in her department. The bulk of the work always seemed to be in the engineering and physics buildings.

One day, two years earlier when she was new on the job, she was walking back to a physics lab under major renovation and glanced through a small window in the door to a large lecture hall. In that passing moment she caught sight of an elderly white balding man, energetically waving his arms and writing things on one of the many white boards lining the front of the lecture room. She suddenly froze, backed up a step and just stared in through that window, trying to absorb the scene in all its details. The audience appeared completely captivated, most of them leaning in, hunched over their laptops or notepads trying to record what was happening. Her gaze returned to the professor, his head swiveling between the board and the students as his lips moved rapidly. To Angel, it was just muffled sounds but suddenly she longed to hear what was being said, wondering what could be so engaging to those young students. The professor's prominent ears caught her attention adding to the allure of expert knowledge passing from master to apprentice.

"Angelica! Whassup?" blared from behind her. It was Miguelito on his way to meet her at the same lab. She snapped out of her trance and suddenly felt a bit ridiculous and out of place. What's a thirty three year old mamacita looking at? Stuff she got no business with.

"Primo! Is nothing. Nos vamos." They walked deeper into the facility and reached the staircase leading to the basement laboratory where the contractors waited to hear the bad news concerning a long list of careless mistakes. Miguel started to descend but Angel turned her head to take another look back toward that lecture hall where something inexplicable had happened. She wasn't quite sure what.