At 7:12 on a Saturday morning, a broken bookcase stood in the middle of Elena Morales’s driveway, its shelves bowed like tired shoulders. Behind it waited a cracked patio table, three bags of renovation debris, and the remains of a kitchen that had been remodeled one cabinet at a time. The work was finished. The mess, however, had nowhere to go.
Across the street in Pasadena, sprinklers ticked over a neat lawn. Somewhere beyond the rooftops, the San Gabriel Mountains caught the first pale gold of daylight. Elena looked at the pile, then at the narrow side yard her family needed to use.
