The drive home was a sacred thing. A moment of peace, even on the freeway, even surrounded by countless other motorists eager to get wherever they were going. Lora had not lived alone for much of her life - it had been her parents, and roommates, and restaurant employees, with her own spaces sprinkled here and there. Such spaces in Ridgefield County had always been colored with something sour. And now here she was again, living with someone. Some part of her was still not used to it, was still stiffly keen for consistent solitude. Most of her had fallen in love with it easily.
This was her compromise. The drive. Leagues above the city bus. A window cracked for escaping cigarette smoke, the wires of her earbuds tangling with her hair, the setting sun prodding at her eyes and her head utterly empty. For a little bit, she was alone, and she was someone else entirely.
Getting home was sacred, too. Their street was no fancy suburb; there were houses with foil on the windows and cars that hadn't run in years sleeping on lawns. Young men with kitchen table tattoos smoking joints on their front porches, old women herding barefoot babies through dead grass. Lora couldn't put her finger on it, but she loved it. She loved these glimpses into crunchy human life as before she parked the old Subaru next to the old Chevy, loved the ugly blue paint on the siding of their sagging little rental house.
She could smell the brownies before she even got up the steps, lips pursing curiously as she pulled her earphones out. The front door opened with a weary creak, and there was Mateo in the middle of their rearranged living room, holding a painting in his lap. It took her a second to absorb the scene, the sheets and the paints and the open windows. Even the hyena was quiet, curious and looming.
"Hola?!" she laughed, plopping her purse down on the floor as she approached him slowly. "What's this, huh?"