Mrs. Delgado was hot. That was still a fact, like gravity or the price of gas. But the story wasn't about that. The story was about a sixteen-year-old kid who stopped seeing a "hot mom" and started seeing Elena—the woman who could beat you at Scrabble, who cried at dog commercials, and who, when Leo finally went to college, would be the one left behind, drinking her iced coffee alone in a quiet kitchen.

As she walked back upstairs, Leo rolled his eyes at me. "See? Total dictator."

One afternoon, a freak thunderstorm rolled in. The power flickered, the AC died, and the basement turned into a sauna. Leo groaned. "Game over, man. I'm going to take a cold shower."

"Mom!"

The Summer of Seeing Clearly

In that moment, the fantasy I didn't even know I'd been nursing—the "my friend's hot mom" daydream—evaporated. It was replaced by something realer, and better. She wasn't a crush. She was a person. A whole, complex person who worried about her son, who made killer iced coffee, who had dirt under her fingernails and laugh lines around her eyes.

Leo threw a pillow at my head. "Don't let it go to your head, nerd."

She smiled, and it wasn't a flirty smile or a staged one. It was a tired, genuine, mom smile. "No, he's not. He's stubborn and he leaves his socks everywhere. But you see the good stuff. That's a gift."

"Your mom says I'm a gift," I said, deadpan.