by Unknown
Angel slides to the ground, the damp bath mat rumpled under her haunches. For a time there is only the sound of her sniffles.
Amadeo retrieves the toilet paper roll and tears off a bunch. “Here.”
Angel accepts it, but doesn’t wipe her nose. She then turns her tear-streaked face toward him. Her expression is shining, miserable. “Dad, what am I going to do?”
He looks around the bathroom, but there’s no help to be found. He’s nineteen again and it’s summer, and he’s with Marissa in her parents’ backyard. They stretch out by the kiddie pool, beers warming in their hands and in the sun, while Angel plays. Amadeo has a plastic dinosaur in his hand, a purple stegosaurus, and he’s making it dance on the surface of the water, while Angel, with her damp black curls, slick red smile, and swollen diaper, slaps the water with fat hands and laughs her throaty laugh. They’re talking about Marissa’s older sister’s new trailer—two bedrooms, full bath, cream carpet—and Marissa says she wouldn’t mind a trailer, they could get a trailer, used at first, and beside them Angel splashes, a blade of grass stuck to her chest. Amadeo says, “You won’t catch me living in no trailer. Besides, they just lose value,” and Marissa says, stubbing out her cigarette emphatically in the grass, “It’s not that I wouldn’t rather a house, but when? And we gotta be saving if we ever want to have a place of our own—are you even saving anything?” This is when the fight starts, escalates. Amadeo accuses Marissa of getting pregnant just so he’d have to take care of her, and he calls her a whore. (She isn’t, he knows that, hasn’t done any more than he has.) Then they’re both on their feet, beers tipped into the grass, and he slaps her across the upper arm, which is exposed in her sleeveless shirt. Marissa staggers back, reaches behind her into the air to steady herself, finds no hold, falls.
Amadeo looks at his hitting hand, horrified. But if he were honest, he might admit that even as he moved to hit her, he knew he could stop himself and knew he was going to do it regardless. The real surprise is the shock on her face, proof that he can act on the world.
Marissa stands. The skin on her arm turns white, then red, where his palm made contact.
“You asshole. Don’t you ever hit me again,” she screams at him, throwing plastic buckets and toys. Some strike him, some miss and fall to the grass. She keeps yelling, “Don’t you ever hit me again!”
And it is that word, again, that terrifies him, as if by uttering it she opens up the possibility that he has it in him to do this again—even, somehow, makes it inevitable. From the kiddie pool, Angel watches her parents, eyes wide and black and unwavering.
“Don’t you walk away,” Marissa yells, and Amadeo turns just long enough to see her grab the baby, too roughly, Angel’s head falling back as Marissa swings her onto her hip, water from the baby’s sodden diaper spreading dark across her shirt and denim cutoffs, down her short brown legs. She’s calling him names, and he’s thinking of how loud her voice must be so near Angel’s soft pink ear. Even as he starts the truck, Amadeo doesn’t think he’ll leave. His breath is ragged, he’s shaking, and he’s on Paseo de Oñate when he realizes he’s still gripping the stegosaurus in his hand.
Now he slides down beside his daughter and pulls her to him.
ALL AFTERNOON Angel is remote. He holds Connor, and when the baby becomes fussy from hunger, she takes him wordlessly and positions him against her, her movements careful. By evening, though, she is once again narrating to the baby every detail of every moment: “What’s Mama cooking? She’s cooking chicken breasts. One, two, three.” He allows himself to think that whatever mood struck her has passed, and he tells himself that if only she’ll be okay, if only Connor will be okay, he’ll never speak with Brianna again, except, of course, in the way that a caring father interacts with his daughter’s teacher.
Angel coos at Connor. Impossible that his daughter could possibly feel such despair. Yes, she’s going through a difficult time, and Connor’s not sleeping well, but she’s young, she’s pretty, she has a new baby in a soft little duck suit.
As the summer wears on, Yolanda’s great-grandson grows, good- natured and rashy. His eczema covers his bottom and encircles his little scrotum, red and painful-looking, creeps down the backs of his legs. His thighs are scaly and dry, little white rings of roughness around new pink skin beneath. Angel spends hours on the internet looking for cures, insists on leaving him naked whenever possible.
“You’re a little yucky,” sings Angel sweetly from the bathroom as she daubs him with cream as thick as oil paint. He kneads his toes. “You’re a sticky yucky baby-pie. Let’s get that old rash off you.”
A baby should be the ideal antidote to death. Watching him grow new rolls of fat and learn to laugh and kick should be exactly the thing to distract Yolanda from her own failing body. But for reasons she cannot understand, she is having trouble focusing on him.
Her interests have constricted around her. She no longer cares to watch her telenovelas, no longer feels compelled by the outlandish plots. She no longer cares about work. She doesn’t have the energy anymore to even flip through a magazine. She spends the hours she isn’t at work or appointments lying on her bed, looking up into the canopy.
Angel doesn’t knock, just comes right in, and Yolanda feels a wringing little twinge of annoyance, but she pats the bedspread anyway and says, “Come sit down.”
Angel flings herself, limbs flopping every which way, her hair spread on the satin sham. She’s not a child; she has a woman’s body, but still, she seems to think she can climb into her grandmother’s bed and curl up. She thinks she is safe here.
“What’s going on, honey?”
“Gramma, do you love him?”
“Connor? Mi hijita, of course I do.” But as much as she loves him, she loves him at a remove. She likes to watch him, but doesn’t want to hold him.
“I feel like you don’t love him, Gramma.” Angel’s voice is thick, and Yolanda can see how much it costs her to say this. “I mean, I know you love him. I just thought you’d love him more. Like you love me.”
“Oh, hijita.” How can she explain that the love she feels already is too much to lose? How can she be asked to get to know and then part from someone else? “I love you both more than anything.”
Angel smiles through tears. “More than my dad?”
Yolanda chuckles. “All my babies. I love all my babies with my whole heart.”
Angel is silent, plucking at the satin of the duvet. Finally she says, “I’m scared, Gramma.”
Me, too, Yolanda nearly says. Instead she grips her granddaughter’s hand. “Oh, hijita. The baby blues pass.”
Amadeo’s business model is simple. He drives around the Española Valley—rather, Angel drives, and Amadeo directs, while Connor blows raspberries with merry imperiousness from the backseat—searching for windshields in need of repair. Angel has thrown herself into the endeavor with surprising zeal. She insisted on being made full partner, which isn’t exactly fair, since Amadeo is doing all the work and will be getting his license back in four months anyway, but his hands were tied.
“I’m a skilled worker. It takes skill to drive.” Angel makes a big show of keeping track of her hours on a table she printed out at school and keeps in the glove compartment. Inexplicably, her mood has improved. Angel is a good driver—cautious, yet willing to make up time on long, straight stretches—which pleases Amadeo.
Everywhere they go, sunlight flashes off windshields, catches in the cracks and divots, and from his place in the passenger seat, the cracks seem to Amadeo like scattered diamonds waiting to be gathered. In his rear-facing car seat, Connor, who is so well behaved Amadeo sometimes wonders if there isn’t something amiss, babbles and flaps his arms, batting at the plush rattles that dangle before him.
They circle parking lots of shopping centers, supermarkets, casinos, as far north as Taos, as far south as Santa Fe. Whenever he sees a crack or a divot or bull’s-eye in a windshield, he slips his card under the wiper, along with his photocopied n
ote—Hi! I see you have a crack! I can help! Remember: cracks spread and cracks are dangerous. Let me save your life!!!!!!! All cracks fixed, cheap. This is what is known as targeted marketing. All he has to do is wait for the calls to pour in. They haven’t yet, but he has faith. Amadeo is pleased with his flyer—it seems he has struck the perfect balance between friendliness and stern paternalistic care. He imagines it must make his customers feel good, knowing that Amadeo is in the world, looking out for them.
For him, this isn’t just a profit thing. Amadeo truly is concerned for these would-be customers. He’s haunted by images of people for whom he is too late: the woman turning left into an eighteen-wheeler obscured by a crack, or the small child dragged under the wheels of a sedan, tricycle sparking across the blacktop. He pictures himself arriving on the scene, kit in hand, just in time to prevent an accident.
Angel sits as upright as a debutante, gripping the wheel. When a song she likes comes on, her scowl breaks and she sings along, shimmying and bopping intently. Amadeo is reminded of Angel as she was when she was a little kid; she has that same intensity of being. Angel so entirely inhabits her own life. Amadeo can’t remember ever feeling that he belonged entirely to his life, not when he was sixteen or six or twenty-six. It seems to him that he’s always been hiding out in his mother’s living room, waiting for his true existence to find him. Now, though, as his daughter taps her thumbs on the wheel to the music, it occurs to him that life has started. This is it, here.
He has his daughter, and he has a job. And there’s another bright spot: Brianna, with whom Amadeo has been texting. They met up again two nights ago, and she fell asleep on his chest, her hair across his shoulder. He cuts a look at Angel again, uneasy.
She grins. “What?”
“Keep your eye on the road.”
Today, on their third afternoon out, Amadeo and Angel return to the parking lot of the Golden Mesa Casino, which, at eleven in the morning, is already filled with sedans. Angel allows old people to pass in front of her as they hobble across the blacktop toward the automatic doors and the dim air-conditioning inside. Among the squashed paper soda cups and food wrappers, Amadeo sees his flyers blowing around the parking lot, which might explain why he hasn’t gotten any calls yet.
“Hang on here, will you?” he asks, and Angel pulls over to a curb.
Amadeo chases the flyers, stoops to catch them—this early in his business he must be frugal—and places them under the wipers of the parked cars. This time he doesn’t just target the cars with dings, because maybe the owners have cracks in the windshields of cars in their driveways at home. Maybe their relatives drive around with their windshields refracting light.
“Hey,” calls a security guard, shuffling toward him. “You can’t be doing that here.” The man’s walkie-talkie crackles at his waist.
“I’m just trying to make a living, man,” Amadeo says in his most charming tone. “I’m not bothering no one.”
The guard shakes his head. He’s sweating, the drops sliding beneath his black crew cut. “No soliciting.” He puts his hand to his walkie-talkie, ready to call for backup.
“Excuse me, sir,” says Angel, who has appeared at Amadeo’s side. Behind her, the truck chimes its incessant reminders: key in the ignition, door open, baby in the backseat. “I know you’re doing your job, but please look the other way? Just to be nice? We’re trying to start this business and it’s been hard to get customers.”
The guard considers Angel, and Amadeo does, too: her green hoodie, her long straight hair pulled into a crooked ponytail, the loose strands framing her round face. She smiles sweetly. Pink cheeks and chapped lips. Her demeanor is genuine, as if she isn’t trying to get away with something.
“Sorry,” mumbles the man. “Unless you’re here to gamble, you gotta go.”
Defeated, they get into the truck. She slams her door and clicks her seat belt with emphasis, glaring at the guard’s broad retreating back. “Dick.”
“Hey now. Don’t talk like that.” Amadeo pivots in his seat to check the baby. When he reaches back, Connor seizes his grandfather’s hand and shakes it, crowing with loopy joy.
The guard, halfway across the lot, seems relieved when Angel starts the engine.
“Screw that guy,” she says. “We’ll come back at night. We just have to go stealth.”
Amadeo looks at her admiringly. “Stealth. I like that.”
“We can’t take no for an answer. No one’s responsible for our happiness but us.”
Amadeo is oddly comforted by these corny platitudes that she clearly believes. She believes them because she hears them from Brianna, delivered with the young woman’s enthusiasm and seriousness. He thinks of the work Angel is doing for his business, thinks about her admiration for her teacher. It occurs to him that Angel is giving him permission. Briefly he imagines himself and Brianna, married, living in a big house somewhere green and lush, sunlight streaming though large windows. They could have another kid, start a real life, the kind of life recognizable from television commercials, all of them living together in a house with a lawn and a porch with pillars, the kind of life you were supposed to get, not this half-formed humiliating thing he’s been living.
He reaches out to touch Angel’s wrist. He looks at his hand on her wrist, then drops it back to his lap.
She turns to him with surprise.
“Eyes on the road,” he says. “You’re right. Let’s come back tonight.”
The other girls are doing Vocabulary Building when Angel shuts the classroom door and goes down the hall to the nursery. Connor is having his Tummy Time on the blue mat, swimming his arms and legs through the air like a beached sea mammal. His little neck strains to hold his head up, and his face and the parts of his scalp visible through his patchy hair redden with his exertion. Finally he drops his face into the mat, and Angel has to stop herself from rushing to sweep him up. But he doesn’t cry. Instead he lifts his head once more, his focus as strained as constipation. He starts paddling again.
Angel loves leaving her classroom to feed Connor. It feels at once wonderfully decadent and justified. Once in third grade, her mother picked her up from school at ten in the morning to take her to a doctor’s appointment, and before she went back, they stopped for lunch. It had felt like a marvelous treat, eating her baked potato (extra bacon bits) from its paper boat, chatting with her mother, while back in the school cafeteria, her classmates were lined up at sticky tables that smelled of mop water and bologna. Each time she gets up from her desk to find Connor, Angel misses her mother.
Connor flips over and now squints at a fluorescent panel far above him.
“Hey,” Angel says to Lynne and Gail, the women in their fifties who watch the kids. At the sound of her voice he cranes his head toward her and flaps, mouth open in a gummy smile.
Lynne, hunched cross-legged on the mat near him, looks up from her phone. “There’s your mom,” she tells him mildly.
“Connor’s already had two BMs,” says Gail, gesturing to the bulletin board covered in Daily Logs. She’s eating yogurt at a tiny table, her big bottom engulfing the dinky wooden chair. Across from her, Ysenia’s baby, who has the wrinkled, squashed face of a pug, carries Cheerios to her mouth one by one, inspecting each gravely.
Before Connor was born, she admired Gail and Lynne’s adept, no-nonsense approach to child care, their easy, unsentimental, and democratically cheerful way with the babies. But now, seeing them handle Connor without any special affection, she finds them suspect. She sweeps Connor into her arms with a sense of rescuing him from their indifference. Her joy at having his little face close to her own is so complete that she can’t even be annoyed with them.
“I missed you, I missed you,” she chants quietly into his shoulder.
For weeks Angel has waited in dread to be overtaken again by darkness, but, thank heavens, she hasn’t. She can’t even imagine, now, where that madness came from. Everything in Angel’s life seems lighter and more possible. Even the sting o
f Brianna’s rejection has lessened.
The nursery is outfitted with eight cribs. Connor’s, with its fleecy yellow blanket and turtle crib sheet, is the second-farthest from the door, which makes him the second-least-likely to be kidnapped, unless the kidnapper is basing his selection on looks, in which case her child is in trouble. The babies are never, of course, left unattended, but disastrous scenarios constantly arise in Angel’s imagination.
In the corner is a folding screen painted with Japanese cranes, and behind this is a padded rocking chair, where Angel nurses her baby. She rocks them both into drowsiness, listening to Connor’s rhythmic snuffling, to the babbling and cries from the other side of the screen, the squeaking of toys and rattling of blocks. Ysenia’s baby whacks her spoon on the table, and Lynne and Gail chatter about the patio furniture Gail is considering buying. Angel cups her son’s foot in her hand, gazing down into his little red shell ear and his half-closed, black-lashed eye. His fontanel pulses.
Every once in a while, driving around after school with her dad, she needs to pull over to feed Connor. She circles the truck, gets in the backseat, and pulls him toward her. Each time, her dad gets out of the truck and stands a few feet away. Occasionally he checks his phone, presumably texting Yolanda or one or another of his friends, guys he went to school with or has met at the car races he likes to go to a few times a year, in Albuquerque or Bernalillo, but mostly kicking at the gravel and squinting into the bowl of the sky. Angel feels pleasantly sleepy in the afternoon, the baby kneading her breast, the sun warming the cab, the breeze lifting her hair from the roots.
Occasionally she’ll call something out to her dad, but if the wind carries her question away, he’ll say “Huh?” without coming closer, afraid, she knows, to see her breast.
He’s not so bad, her dad. She can see the effort he’s making. In parking lots, while she stays with the baby, he jogs from car to car, moving purposefully, clamping windshield wipers over his flyers. She has her doubts about the viability of this enterprise. It’s been three weeks, and they still haven’t gotten any calls. She can’t get past the fact that this was a kit purchased from the television, that this same kit was presumably sold to hundreds of other lonely men awake and drinking in the middle of the night and hoping for another shot at a career. She wonders if it’s generational, this trust in television, and she pities her dad for being taken in. The fact is, she doesn’t see a whole lot of pocked windshields. In the whole Family Foundations parking lot, which can have up to twenty cars parked in it—more if the liquor store customers park there—there are only four cars with tiny dings, and though they’ve left flyers, no one has called. The fact is, dings just aren’t that big a deal.