Realizing that I don’t need to have this talk for at least another three weeks sends a cool prickling sensation up and down my arms, as if a strangler suddenly released his grip from my throat. I plop my phone onto the leather booth and return to my milkshake with a renewed zest for life.

Sue’s Diner hasn’t had a fresh coat of paint since the moon landing, but Ambrose doesn’t care if things are old and busted, as long as they stay the same. These menus were printed eons before my birth, and there’d be riots if they changed a single item. The only menu modifications have been updated pricing stickers, which lay plastered and crooked over the yellowing laminate. Still, Sue herself has proudly never missed a day of work in sixty years. Well into her late eighties, she sports a Pepto Bismol-pink wig and totes around an oxygen tank as she observes her twenty-year-old busboy at work. He kneels on the countertop by the refrigerator-sized milkshake machine and fiddles behind it delicately with a wrench.

“You gotta slap the motor,” Sue badgers him, huffing like she’s frustrated that she can’t hop up there and take care of the damn thing herself.

Sweating and fidgeting, the busboy says, “I’m gonna break it. It’s fragile.”

“That machine is gonna outlive you, Gabe. It’ll bury us all. Slap it!”

Gabe winces and does as he’s told. The moment his palm makes contact, the motor belches once and then shimmies to life with a satisfying thrum. The corners of Sue’s lips upturn and she gives her iron monstrosity a grim, respectful nod. No one in Ambrose is happier than Sue at the cultural resurgence of old-timey nostalgia, or else someone would surely complain about this ancient beast. It probably spits flecks of lead paint into each milkshake. Nevertheless, Sue’s shakes are famously brick thick and arctic cold, and I’ll drink them until I die. I don’t know how she does it, but her strawberry shakes taste like someone froze Fruity Pebbles in milk.

I shouldn’t be freaking out so much about coming out. My sexual orientation isn’t gay—it’s milkshake.

I ignore Ario’s next nudging text and scrape the final remains of my shake out of the galvanized tin sidecar. “You got your badge?” I ask my mom, and she jerks away from her Vanilla Pepsi to hunt through her purse. After a tense moment of searching, she pulls out her multitiered nursing badge: Marcia Major, BSN, RN, St. Josephine’s Medical Center, and clips it to her scrub top. She forgot it last week and had to turn around and go all the way home to get it. Day shift nurses couldn’t leave until she came back, people complained—it was a whole nightmare. Mom can’t afford another write-up.

“Oh, thank you,” she says on a relieved breath.

“Got your phone charger?”

“Yes.”

“Wallet?”

“Yep.”

“You got enough on Starbucks for a venti?”

“Who’s the mom here? You or me?”

“Me, duh.” I grin and chomp another fry as she giggles into her Pepsi. A surge of warmth surrounds me like a protective shield—almost visible, shimmering as gold and ultraviolet as sunrays. I will do anything to preserve the ecosystem between my mother and me. If it means she goes on thinking I’m straight while I meet up with Ario during her night shifts, then that sounds like a pretty good life to me. “Do you got enough?”