"And?"
I pointed at the pancakes. "This is better."
His laugh was immediate and genuine.
The conversation wandered between road trips, motorcycles, broken engines, strange towns, stranger people and at one point Hector spent ten minutes describing getting stranded in the desert between Mexico and Texas on one of his trips because his truck had broken down in the middle of nowhere.
"What did you do?" I asked.
"Waited," he said.
"For how long?"
"Eight hours," he replied, taking a calm sip of coffee.
I stared at him. "That's insane."
"It got fixed," he said simply.
"That isn't the point," I told him.
"It usually is," he replied.
The worst part was that I found myself completely absorbed in every story — not because the stories themselves were extraordinary, but because of the way
